Raspberry Pi Info Hub

Hardware

This project uses a Raspberry Pi and a three colour 5.83" 648x480 e-paper display.

More specifically, this model: ER-EPD0583-1R-5103 from EastRising, with an included Pi HAT.

I assume it can easily be swapped out for an equivalent model from another vendor using the same library code (e.g. WaveShare), or even one of different size, by replacing the lib/epd/ER-EPD0583-1 files with the specific interface provided for your particular model, and then refitting the code in main.c.

Dependencies

This project requires the following libraries:

• bcm2835 for communicating with the display
• iddawc for communicating with google services

How to use

First of all, this is not intended as a drop-in solution for anyone. I want you to build on it, tinker with it, rip out what you don't need and expand it with what you want it to do.
I'm just providing a basis with what I wrote for myself, not guaranteeing support for anything you want to do with it.

Important Notes

• By default bmc2835 requires root permissions. There may be a way to avoid this using capabilities, but it requires some extra steps, which are detailed on the bcm2835 project page. Personally I haven't got it to work but I may have missed something.
• All the Google integration stuff will require an API key with appropriate permissions, which you will need to acquire for yourself.

Fonts

I've looked at a variety of bitmap fonts to find something that is to my liking, but this project supports any font in .bdf format.
I have included the fonts Scientifica (11pt), Kakwa (12pt), and Cozette (13pt) for convenience, with all three being licensed under the Open Font License.
Further I can recommend:

• Lode 15pt, quite a bit of language support (though rtl is not supported in my code)
• CtrlD 10pt, 13pt, 16pt
• Creep 12pt
• Terminus 6pt to 16pt

For my bigger screen a lot of these smaller fonts are going to be used in 2x scale, but for a smaller screen you may well want to go for 1x.

E-paper Interface License

The code in lib/epd is based on the example code from the vendor with a decent amount of modifications.
Sadly it is provided without any license, but with a bit of research I found this repository from WaveShare, which contains – beside support for other displays, code which is almost identical to the one used here.
The only difference being parts of the (sadly undocumented) cryptic init sequence for the display.
More importantly though, it is licensed under the MIT license. I'm gonna take that as reason enough to provide this code fully, with my modifications in this repository.