e-ink-calendar-esp32

E-ink calendar based on ESP32 and Waveshare 1304×984 12.48 inch 3-color display

UPDATE 2024-05

Turned out, Waveshare displays are shit 💩, after about 4 months of using, the red color became light-pink and can barely seen at all.

I don't recommend building this project until I upgrade it to something more reliable.

Photos

A real wall-mounted e-ink calendar from my kitchen:

See more pictures in the pictures/ dir

Design

The most complicated part was to get all the electronic parts together. The display requires a specific driver board which is only sold by Waveshare and can only be ordered by directly inquiring sales. Then the wiki page incorrectly specifies that the cable is 24-pin. It is not. It is 30-pin. Waveshare sent wrong cables twice. After that I realized that you cannot fit a standard ESP32 dev module into the driver board, because Waveshare made it incompatible (different size and two pins swapped), you must order a special Waveshare braded ESP32 board.

It took 6 months for me to get all the needed parts. If you decide to assemble this project, I recommend you to get a module set which includes everything you need.

After everything gets connected, the data flows as following:

graph TD;
    A[Cron]-->|magic link|B[Google];
    B-->|iCal|A
    A-->|write|C[Generate PNG];
    C-->|read|A
    A-->|Send packets|D[Display];

At this point no authentication is implemented. ESP32 would accept any request. You should only run this solution in a trusted LAN.

Quick start

Get Waveshare 12.48 inch module: $185 link
Get Waveshare ESP32 E-Paper driver: $15 link
Install Arduino, add ESP32 board json, open project and upload it.
Generate Google Calendar magic link
Edit .env file
Run pull_calendar.sh

Host program

Host program requires Ubuntu, bash, python3 or docker.

See cron/ dir for instructions.

ESP32 firmware

See esp32/ dir for instructions.

antnks / e-ink-calendar-esp32

readme