Summary
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The 13.3-color e-ink dashboard on this Pi Zero 2 W looks like real art, not a screen.
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Open-source Tesserae powers the browser-based Home Assistant control with 30 widgets and 10 templates.
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It switches pages between weather, Spotify, to-dos, GitHub stats, photos; Spectra 6 palette tuned with Floyd-Steinberg dither.
One of my favorite things about E-Ink displays is that they disappear see such as screens. Sure, they’re screens and you can put whatever you want on them, but unlike LCDs, you can fit an e-Ink display into a picture frame and it won’t look out of place. One great example has just surfaced in the Raspberry Pi community, and while the final product looks amazing, the software that drives it is a great tool for smart home displays.
This awesome e-Ink dashboard on Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W runs some powerful software.
And it’s all open source
On it The Raspberry Pi subredditA GitHub user posted that they are working on dmellock. It’s an amazing e-Ink display that they put inside a picture frame, creating something you can hang on the wall without getting weird looks from visitors. But it’s not just a pretty picture:
The dashboard cycles through several pages. The image includes the weather, what’s playing on Spotify, a to-do list, a word clock and a 5-day forecast. Others include a GitHub stats page, a full-blooded photo page, and a Home Assistant overview. The Spectra 6 palette only has seven colors, so I spent some time adjusting the Floyd-Steinberg dither so that the panel looked intentional rather than a random semitone. Once this is done, the results are immediately visible.
A program called Raspberry Pi is running Ticketsit was also created by the creator. Tesserae’s main focus seems to be that it lets people control multiple Home Assistant devices from their browser, including 10 preset templates, 30 widgets, and a design built around ease of use. Sounds like a great way to wrap up your smart home if you ask me.
