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I'm currently working on a horticultural project with my Raspberry Pi. I have a fair amount of my project sorted out but still have a rather major part of the project to undergo which is the integration of an e-ink display to display diagnostics and measurements.

For some background, my project is quite simply 3 shelves of plants, each having it's own watering system, LED lighting and soil moisture sensor (there is also 1 thermometer located on the top shelf). The Raspberry Pi then monitors and controls the growing conditions for the plants. My aim is to attach a small (2-4 inch) e-ink display to the pre-existing setup and have it display a GUI which can show the user information like the humidity, temperature and time in a similar manner to my mockup below:

E-Ink mockup

However, I have found that there is not the same abundance of resources available for e-ink displays as there are for other displays such as LCDs.

My question is: How would I pipe my sensor data into the e-ink display and have it add graphic elements such as the percentage circle?

P.S. I saw a video here where they were able to have the HDMI output completely black and only the necessary information in white. I was thinking that maybe this could be done with the colours flipped. But of course, the problems come that I am unaware of how to make such a programme (is there one already available) and that surely the e-ink would have to be either HDMI or DSI Display port.

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I see this question was asked almost 3 years back. I hope that this information will be useful to you.

Firstly: 2 to 4 inches is quite small for all that info. But up to you.

Down to the nitty-gritty: You need a driver circuit to send the update to the ePaper display. The Adafruit one mentioned by @Tom in the previous post has the driving circuit and ePaper display all-in-one.

I have used an ePaper display from Waveshare for my project. It's a bit bigger at 6" and happily takes an 800x600 image. All that you need to do is generate a bitmap image on the pi, then run the command, and it sends it to the display.

You can see an older video of it working with the attached Pi zero here enter image description here

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Since power does not seem to a problem. The Rpi touchscreen and accompanying case seems like a better option to me. But, if you still want to go e-ink, I am using this

https://www.adafruit.com/product/3335?gclid=CjwKCAjwyMfZBRAXEiwA-R3gMyv638JvFp6GcvHh5hCmNEf02OxWcaVMWaSILeiOwVhJk5-FZ3qahxoCfMoQAvD_BwE

on a current project with rpi zero, the the linking docs do a great job of getting you up and running with text and graphics, and there is a number of example projects that you can run right off the bat to showcase the features. The one I linked in pretty small, but I believe the company makes larger ones, just don't think adafruit carries them.

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  • Thanks for your reply! I'll have a look at that product but I agree, it may be simpler just to go for a normal display instead.
    – Tom
    Jun 27, 2018 at 12:29

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