E-Ink, Therefore I Am (Slightly Less Distracted)
Last month on r/raspberry_pi while we were doom scrolling, we found a pretty recent post by u/akz-dev showcasing their InkyPi e-paper productivity project. It’s a satisfyingly over-engineered project, the kind that we love in the Raspberry Pi community.
What They Built (and Why It’s Genius)
Using a Raspberry Pi, u/akz-dev created a slick, clean, battery-friendly E-ink screen to display essentials like calendars, to-do lists and even GitHub contribution graphs. The Genius is using a headless browser for rendering the complex, yet customizable html/css layouts basically solving e-inks static nature.
My immediate reaction? I feel it’s a perfect blend of high-tech effort for a low-tech result. Using a powerful machine like a Raspberry Pi might be a bit overkill for this project but that’s what makes this project so fantastically meta. It just shows that sometimes you need to over-engineer a system to fully simplify a workflow.
The next step in this project, as discussed in the comments and what we agree with, is integrating a sleep/wake cycle using Real-Time Clock for some battery optimization essentially turning this device into a once a month charge!
