Inky Impression movie one frame at a time

Discussion Projects
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I created a new project variant of “slow movie” player for the Inky Impression and you can find it here ePaper Movie Frame

If anyone has had any luck with using the PiSugar 2 let me know. I’d love to get this running on a battery and only turning on to update every hour.

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Very nice project and good documentation.

I don’t know the PiSugar2, but for my Inky-Impression I created my own power-management exactly for this purpose: run from battery and only turn it on in intervals.

If you want something simpler: use a DC-DC converter with enable-pin (e.g. Adafruit’s PowerBoost 1000) or something larger in case you are using a bigger Pi. The DC-DC converter must supply stable 5V for the Pi.

Then drive the enable pin with a TPL5110 (also from Adafruit).

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Thanks! I think I might even have a spare PowerBoost 1000. I’ll give this a try.

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Some more hints:

I use the following systemd-service definition (excerpt):

[Service]
Type=oneshot
RemainAfterExit=true
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/update_inky.py
ExecStart=/bin/systemctl poweroff

This will update the inky during boot and then trigger shutdown immediately.

In /boot/config.txt, I have added:

dtoverlay=gpio-shutdown,gpio_pin=26

This will trigger low->high after shutdown. If you connect this pin (or a better one, I think you will need to choose something different) to the “DONE”-pin of the TPL5110 this will then shutdown the DC-DC.

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That looks good. How close are the images in the example photos to what those images would look like on a full colour display?

I’ve made my own take on a slow movie player inspired in part by the blog posts you mentioned, but it uses an old Nook eReader for the display part. (Inspired by Turning an eInk screen into a monochrome art gallery – Terence Eden’s Blog) I’ve been idly wondering about doing a version of it using an Inky display but an sceptical of how good it would look.

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I think the quality of the display is excellent, but it can me a bit less color saturated than the source photo depending on the content of the photo of course. I’m currently using it with animation frames as the source material and they look great to me. I should point out that it really makes a big difference on the type of lighting you have on it since it’s all passive / reflective. I have one currently hanging in a more shaded part of my home and it’s harder to make out the details of the image. Of course a full color LCD or OLED display is going to look much better, but that’s not the look I was going for.