{"id":1048,"date":"2025-06-16T10:59:50","date_gmt":"2025-06-16T10:59:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/psyphi.net\/blog\/?p=1048"},"modified":"2025-06-16T11:01:42","modified_gmt":"2025-06-16T11:01:42","slug":"a-photo-calendar-frame-with-the-inky-impression-7-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/psyphi.net\/blog\/2025\/06\/a-photo-calendar-frame-with-the-inky-impression-7-3\/","title":{"rendered":"A photo\/calendar frame with the Inky Impression 7.3″"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’ve been excited by e-ink displays for a long while. I leapt on the original, gorgeous reMarkable<\/a> tablet as soon as it came out and have been a regular user and advocate ever since. I would dearly love to have one<\/a> or two<\/a> of these<\/a> enormous<\/a> 42″ e-ink art poster displays on the wall, but that’s for another day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve also been a long-time customer of Pimoroni<\/a> and was aware of their range of nifty Inky displays. I recently came across this neat project<\/a> by @mimireyburn and managed to pick up a 7.3″ Inky Impression after it being on back-order for only a week or two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Inky Impression 7.3″ with protective film and screen reflection<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The Inky Impression 7.3″ rear with mounted Raspberry Pi Zero 2W<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

After flashing RPi OS on a clean card for the Pi Zero 2W, downloading the project, setting up Python, compilers, virtualenvs, prerequisites, etc. I was presented with a complete failure of the underlying driver and inky library to communicate with the display. This isn’t a fault of the inky-calendar project at all, may I reiterate, but unfortunately a very regular occurrence I’ve found when using many Pimoroni products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Searching around I tried a few different things, including the usual modifications to boot parameters to enable the drivers\/kernel modules and fiddling with permissions, users etc. but with no success. Now I’ve never deliberately pretended to be a Python programmer, nor do I particularly wish to be one, but I’m pretty good with debugging weird stuff and this was definitely presenting as a driver\/library issue. Specifically some of the differences with the Inky Impression 7.3 seemed to be tripping things up, and it wasn’t a hole I fancied spelunking in today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A little more digging highlighted a NodeJS package<\/a> by @aeroniemi with working Impression 7.3″ display support. I definitely have<\/em> masqueraded as a JavaScript programmer in the past so things were looking up. Some light Claude.AI vibing and I had two working scripts – one to fetch images from PicSum<\/a> and another to replicate the calendar fetching+rendering, both from public iCal and authenticated Google Cal sources – awesome!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some dremel butchery on the back panel of an old 7″ picture frame to fit around the sticky-out components on the back of the board and I was in business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The rear of the photo frame with cut-outs for most of the components on the rear of the display<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Extra clearance given to the left-most microUSB power socket on the Pi Zero 2W<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Improvements<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The only slight drawback with using this NodeJS library is that it only handles the image-display side of things – there’s no built-in support for the function buttons – something to revisit another day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another improvement would be to better-handle power – the main benefit of e-ink is that it doesn’t need power once the display has been set, and that’s not being utilised here at all – there’s a cronjob running on the Pi which displays the calendar before 10:00AM and photos after that, refreshing every half-hour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*\/30 6-10 * * * cd \/home\/frame\/ ; node ical2png.js --calendar x --calendar y --google-calendar z --service-account KEY.json --view week ; node main.js --image calendar.png\n*\/30 10-23 * * * cd \/home\/frame\/ ; node main.js --dither<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Lastly, obviously, the display needs to load images from a folder rather than from the internet. That’s super-quick to do, and that’s this afternoon’s job. The calendar-rendering – fonts, sizes, colours etc. could do with a little more spit and polish too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The code for this project can be found at https:\/\/github.com\/rmp\/inky-frame<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve been excited by e-ink displays for a long while. I leapt on the original, gorgeous reMarkable tablet as soon as it came out and have been a regular user and advocate ever since. I would dearly love to have one or two of these enormous 42″ e-ink art poster displays on the wall, but … Continue reading “A photo\/calendar frame with the Inky Impression 7.3″”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1049,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[1084,292,199,59,258],"class_list":["post-1048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hardware","tag-hardware","tag-javascript","tag-linux","tag-opensource","tag-software"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t