M5Paper e-ink device for DIY

[Adoby]

Just found two M5Paper in my mailbox! From China to Luxembourg, to Sweden, it seems.

Anyway, the weekend is saved. Or destroyed, depending on the viewpoint...

Looks really nice. But perhaps a little too small to say it has the format of a small e-reader. More of a tiny e-reader. But nice...

[Quoth]

My Palm Z22 is only 160x160 pixels and has a choice of two ereader applications still available for download. I did also download the Adobe PDF reader for Palm, but didn't install it Neither of the two PDB formats are very featured.

[b0rsuk]

I know just enough programming to be dangerous. I'm a web developer learning Rust and trying to transition away from the Frankenweb. At least I know Python.

Can you name some more specific uses for this device? What kind of skills do you train with it? More efficient display algorithms? Reader software? Remote control devices? Turn based games perhaps?

[Adoby]

My purpose with this device is to have fun with it.

Think dash and control for sensors, cameras, lights and actuators and other devices. Using MQTT and Node-Red and perhaps some simple edge AI to recognize and feed the cat. And say "Hi, Adoby!" to me. Monitor and control temp/ventilation/water in a greenhouse. Or temp, ventilation and humidity in a root cellar. Water flow, light, pH and TDS in a hydroponics garden. And whatever else you think might be fun to do.

I saw YT channel with a guy that train magpies to pick up litter (only bottle caps for now) and swap it for a peanuts. Really fun idea! But then you may want to monitor the supply of peanuts, right? So you might need some load sensor to measure the weight of the peanut container. Same for the cat food.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8zDLV3gWsY

[b0rsuk]

It sounds it should be pretty simple to write a program that generates a random setup for a board game? A character for each player, starting boards (with a few complications, such as boards B and F must not appear in the same game), adversary, scenario?

Or a helper device for board games so I can have something more convenient for tracking scores or whatever instead of tokens? Or calculate end game scores faster in, say, 7 Wonders? There's a touch screen so I could display symbols instead of tokens and manipulate them by pressing or dragging.

Basically I'm asking for any gotchas. I know microPython support is not yet there. Do I need some other boards, arduino, raspberry pi or a welding iron or whatever to start having fun? Do I need to write libraries myself for what could be considered "basic" functionality in web development, like pop-ups or GUI work?

[Adoby]

No, it is not simple at all. It is very complicated, the documentation stinks and the learning curve is ridiculously steep. It is intended for makers and DIY. That means that an extremely poor developer experience is expected. A lot of libs are available, but you need to find them. And then check to see if the lib work as you expect them to. And possibly fix them. If you think that sounds fun, then go for it.

There is, as far as I know, no support for dragging. Just up to two simultaneous touch presses. You may be able to use that to create some lib to support dragging, perhaps. Or perhaps someone else has already done that?

Take a look at the UIFlow documentation or the web app to see what GUI functions are supported. Not a lot...

I don't expect to do very fancy stuff with this device. I simply intend to make some panels with buttons to press, some very simple gauges and some simple text labels that depends on what some MQTT broker in the network says. If I had more experience and knowledge, I most likely would be able to do much, much more.

Start with something simpler and cheaper. Build up an infrastructure. Get something running on an Android phone or on a RPi Pico? Setup a MQTT broker and node-red on a RPI4. Control a smart light with MQTT messages.

[Quoth]

It's for experienced developers. People experienced with device drivers, writing low level embedded software and writing GUIs on embedded controllers / cpus without QT, Win API, GTK, X-Windows as well as writing applications for very minimalist platforms that don't have Android
Experience with even server side web programming is almost irrelevant. I've done all of that for many years (Embedded applications, device drivers, GUIs for small graphics screen starting from a level of pixel writing, applications for actual OSes such as Windows, Linux, Android and server side web programming from scratch, not just hacking a CMS) so I know the differences and what's involved. I've given up programming now to concentrate on books (ebooks, paper, audio creation/formatting, editing, proofing and some writing and narration.)

[hobnail]

I'm thinking that what would work for b0rsuk is a device that would let you program in a reasonably high level language, c, python, etc. and had a display, and ran on batteries. Android would fit that bill and I gave it a try but I found it's API to be botched. (Some web sites mentioned Lua and C# but I don't know if they're using the same botched Android API.) Maybe back to the Pi Zero W and a Waveshare display but with a nice enclosure that protected things.

[stevenaleach]

Arg... the waiting. It's been ten days since I ordered from DigiKey. Given a non-functioning link to track the order status, I finally called today to check on it. It seems it's back-ordered with a four week standard manufacturer lead-time. Grr.... Arg...

Meanwhile, USPS should be bringing me an M5Faces kit tomorrow.... so at least I'll be familiar with the platform by the time the M5Paper finally arrives.

It also looks like M5 *MIGHT* be releasing an updated version of the Paper later this year. There was a recent Twitter-tease from M5Stack with a pixelated image of a bag containing all the "M5New" for Q1/Q2 2021... and it sure looks like there's a Paper in the bag. https://twitter.com/M5Stack/status/1357559621389479940 So maybe some changes and improvements to come.

[hobnail]

I just discovered the esp32 subreddit. This was on there:

https://youtu.be/v9sNzmtMSXo

On that youtube page I see two more videos for the m5paper in the list on the right.

[Elektron]

UIFlow is out for the M5Paper. I hit them up on Twitter.

[andyh2000]

Nice looking weather station project with an M5Paper:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mbq6BIsMcAs


Andrew

[hobnail]

That's what I want to do. My idea is to use mqtt for the sensor to send data to an android tablet; the tablet would be an mqtt broker. The tablet is always on unlike the computer. Then the e-paper display can fetch it also using mqtt. This would allow me to have more than one display fetching the data.

Here's another display library. It's written for the arduino but that shouldn't be a problem since the esp32 can use the arduino api. I want to try and use espressif's idf api instead of the arduino one.

https://github.com/ZinggJM/GxEPD

[murraypaul]

From a very quick look, I'd say that the M5EPD library designed for the device is a bit more full-featured for drawing and font support.

[hobnail]

Yes, they do a good job. I'm still thinking about making something using a waveshare e-ink display.