Is it possible to repurpose my inky frame display by attaching it to a more powerful computer, such as the raspberry pi Zero ?
Appreciate any advice. I could attempt to solder if I had to, despite the risks of damaging something, but it’s not something I’ve done before.
Thanks in advance.
IMHO, your odds of getting the PICO off without damaging it are slim to none. It’s surface mounted and not removable with just a soldering iron. Especially if you have never used a soldering iron.
There is an already made Pi version.
Inky Impression 7.3" (7 colour ePaper/E Ink HAT) (pimoroni.com)
Thanks for your reply.
Just to confirm, this is technically possible?
The point of the project is to tinker, and I’m okay with the risk of a rookie like me damaging stuff. Par for the course.
I “think so”, yes? Both us 3.3V logic. I can’t say 100% that you won’t run into an issue as you try it.
I would try to use the Waveshare ESP32-S3-Pico. It has the same form-factor as the Pico and the same pin layout. So if you manage to remove the Pico, you could try to solder the other device in place.
The ESP32-S3-Pico has 16MB flash and 2 MB PSRAM, so you have about 8x RAM. If replacing the hardware works, then your next task is to port the Pimoroni software… Or switch to CircuitPython which does have support for this InkyFrame and will run happily on the Waveshare module.
Thank you for the details. I’ll order the waveshare board. It seems low price enough, and then I’ll attempt a swap once I’ve had enough fun playing around with the inky frame as-is.
If it all goes south, then I’ll look into getting an eink display that doesn’t require any soldering 😊.
The other option would be to leave the Pico alone, and attach your Zero over i2c; that way you can do whatever computationally-heavy stuff you need on the Zero, and leave the Pico as just a display driver.
No soldering required :-)
I am actually doing that on a server. The pico only drives the display and receives the data as json.
How do you attach the pico on the inky frame to another pi, considering the pico is soldered to the inky frame?
Either using the I2C-connector, as @ahnlak suggest, or not at all. The Pico-W does WLAN, so there is actually no need for a physical connection.
On my mini-server (not a Pi, but a similar system) I run a small server, and the Pico-W pulls the data using a normal http get request. When the server receives the get request, it does all the necessary processing and creates the json-response. In my case the server polls various calendars using caldav, does the logic (i.e. extracts the agenda of the day) and then just sends the result. The Pico-W only has to take the data and then does the UI.