ESP8266 ePaper Weather Dashboard - battery-driven

Inspired by Weatherman Dashboard for ESPHome. Implemented Partial display refresh for nicer appearance and Deep Sleep for longer battery life time.

Hardware

• Waveshare 13187 7.5inch e-Paper link
• Waveshare 14138 e-Paper ESP8266 Driver Board link
• IKEA Ribba frame link
• TC4056A charging board link
• 2500mAH Lithium-Polymer battery link

Software

• Arduino
• GxEPD2 for controllling and drawing on the ePaper
• ArduinoJson for decoding the response from Home Assistant
• RTCMemory for storing a counter and determine when to perform a full display refresh
• fonctconvert from AdafruitGFX to convert fonts to header files
• rsvg-convert to convert Material Icons svg to png (with find . -type f -name "*.svg" -exec bash -c 'rsvg-convert -h 512 "$0" > "$0".png' {} \;)
• image2cpp for converting the created png files to header files with bitmaps

After boot, the ESP8288 makes a request to http_endpoint (Home Assistant sensor endpoint for the custom epaper_esp8266_data sensor) and retrieves all needed attributes as JSON. Afterwards, it renders the data to the ePaper display and goes to deep sleep for 10 minutes.

Installation

• cp src/secrets.h.template src/secrets.h and fill out credentials (get the HA token from your Home Assistant profile page)
• add home-assistant/espdata.yml to your Home Assistant configuration.yml and reload the configuration
• open in VSCode with PlatformIO extension installed
• Connect the ES8266, Build, Upload

Notes

• Connect D0/GPIO16 to the RTS pin in order to get the deep-sleep working (afterwards, resetting and holding the flash button is needed for flashing)
• Don't connect USB and battery at the same time
• fontconvert: if the degree symbol should be included, define the right end character. I.e. ./fontconvert GothamRounded-Bold.otf 48 32 177

Future Ideas

• Battery level indicator (similar to here
• OTA Updates via HTTP server
• Presence: show people present/away

(soldering + the mount on the back could be improved 😅)