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Train and Weather Tracker with Raspberry Pi and E-Ink

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The Waveshare e-ink display he's using is $172.99.[0] The one that jgrahamc used in a sibling comment is about $200.[1]

It's a shame that it's not easier to pull the e-ink displays out of used e-readers because you can buy old Kindles on eBay for about $20-40. I know you can jailbreak them and achieve something similar to OP, but it'd be neat if you could just drop the vendor's e-reader firmware entirely and run your own software.

[0] https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/9.7inch-e...

[1] https://soldered.com/product/inkplate-10-9-7-e-paper-board-c...

2 days agoby mtlynch

Fun. I used an e-ink display for something similar (just the weather forecast) and opted to use the onboard ESP-32. I try to stay away from Raspberry Pi for simple things because it's total overkill to have an entire operating system in there.

https://blog.jgc.org/2023/04/a-personal-weather-picture-usin...

2 days agoby jgrahamc

I built something like this. I am amused that mine too was built for my wife and also was one of the few techie things I've ever done that received unqualified spousal approval.

Mine shows weather and tide times at my wife's rowing club. It has the form-factor of a large fridge magnet. This led to the need to be battery powered and therefore very frugal with power - so a RPi wasn't feasible. It uses an ESP32. The data itself is collated by an AWS lambda.

2 days agoby urban_winter

TRMNL community has published a lot of train/metro schedule recipe[1], that can be installed on any e-ink screen[2]

- [1] https://usetrmnl.com/recipes/

- [2] https://docs.usetrmnl.com/go/diy/byod

Disclosure: I work at TRMNL.

2 days agoby ronakjain90

This is one of those projects every nerd loves to build :D

My first iteration back in lockdown [0] focused mainly on rain (I'm from the UK), but later versions used a colour e-ink, added a camera to change the background with a selfie and added train times from my local station, along with upcoming birthdays. Reminds me I need to try and write an update at some point!

[0] https://jamesjarvis.io/posts/2020/06/umbrella-e-ink-weather-...

2 days agoby jamesjarvis

I'm wondering if it's possible to track ANY operational train, not just passenger trains. I'm a railway fan but I'm only interested in fright trains. I guess that piece of information is somewhere within the railway system but not public. And it's probably illegal to get a hold of such information.

Edit Found these: https://asm.transitdocs.com/map

https://railrat.net/ (probably just passenger trains)

2 days agoby ferguess_k

I love an eink project as much as the next person but the trains look like they’re so frequent that if you’re really after “calm” maybe you could just forget about the train times completely, walk when you’re ready and know there will be one along in no time…?

This comes from someone in the middle of the country where there’s no train (nearest an hour drive away) and the buses are twice daily. So, yeh, I’m a little bitter :-)

2 days agoby dmje

I have been using InkyPi for my own E-ink display. It recently got support for weather as well. I'm using a different display though, so your mileage may vary, but for me it works like a charm, would highly recommend. :)

https://github.com/fatihak/InkyPi

2 days agoby rodnim

Love those projects! Did something quite similar a few years ago, found it quite useful and there's something just nice about eink displays for showing info that normal screens don't have

https://lengrand.fr/complete-setup-epaper/

2 days agoby jlengrand

At what point does one decides that a microcontroller doesn’t cut it and moves to a full OS system like rpi?

For example this could be an esp32 project

2 days agoby whatever1

a few of our users open sourced their own public transport (e-ink) plugins here, for major cities like NYC, Chicago, London, Zurich, etc: https://usetrmnl.com/recipes

2 days agoby ryanckulp

I used an Inky wHAT display with an old Raspberry Pi B+ to build a weather display that shows live weather pulled from my Ambient Weather station. My project uses Inky's python library. Since the Ambient API doesn't provide forecasts, I pull a daily forecast from the US Weather Service. And I grab the moon phase from Visual Crossing. https://github.com/skypanther/inkywhat

2 days agoby skypanther

I actually have a project like this, it's an alarm clock though. The idea was to not have something additional glowing at night and could pull my alarms from an online calendar. I've been procrastinating rewriting the code for an esp32 though since I think using my raspberry pi for an alarm clock is kind of a waste.

2 days agoby Cieric

30 degrees and she's dressed in a puffer jacket? Wut?

5 days agoby shermozle