2 weeks Ago
By Dan Moren Updating my smart On Air e-ink sign Hi, I'm the problem, it's me. Some people can leave well enough alone, but not us nerds! You may recall a few years ago, I detailed my creation of a smart On Air sign using a color e-ink display. While I feel that project was largely a success, one major obstacle has kept it from being as useful as I'd hoped: the long battery life.
What? How is long battery life a problem, I can hear you asking. The issue is that the battery life is just long enough that I forget to recharge it until I happen to check and see that it's dead, invariably right before I start recording a podcast. Now, I could just set a reminder to go off every few days to plug in the sign and recharge it, but simple solutions aren't how we ended up here in the first place, are they? Time for some OverEngineeringTM! The idea that came to me one day was sheer elegance in its simplicity: what if I built a system that let me know what the current battery level was so that I could charge it when it was getting low but before it had died? Yep: here we go again.
Easy as Python As long as I was about to embark upon revising my code, I figured I might as well go whole hog. Back when I first set up my Inkplate e-ink display, I opted to use the standard firmware and write my code in the Arduino IDE. As I noted at the time, my expertise with the language wasn't high, but I figured I could muddle through with some help.
However, I knew that the other available option was to flash the board with the MicroPython firmware and I have spent more time working with Python in recent months, so it seemed like a good opportunity to take a crack at that as well. Fortunately, the instructions for installing the firmware on the Inkplate are fairly straightforward, though I did have to do the usual amount of tweaking and looking up details to get it working. The switch to MicroPython also meant I would be relying on command line tools instead of Arduino's GUI IDE,.
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