EinkApp

This repository contains the code for an e-ink painting displayed in our living room. The painting is a Visionect Place & Play that wirelessly cycles through art from various sources every half hour.

To make it feel like a real museum piece, I added an information card next to the painting just like you would find in a gallery. This card is a small secondary e-ink display (Crowpanel 2.13) that shows the title, description, and a QR code linking to the source of the currently displayed artwork. Communication with the Crowpanel uses the OpenDisplay protocol. Since the OpenDisplay firmware did not support the Crowpanel out of the box, I added support for it. A contribution I hope to eventually get merged upstream.

Art is fetched from a variety of sources (Reddit, Unsplash, Art Institute of Chicago, Rijksmuseum, and more), each implemented as a separate module. The architecture is designed to make adding new sources as simple and straightforward as possible.

The system supports multiple displays by assigning a session to each one. Sessions can be managed through the admin interface, and a session ID can be used to retrieve information about the currently displayed content. There are two ways to access this information: visiting the info webpage in a browser (which updates automatically via Server-Sent Events when content changes), or pairing a secondary e-ink display like the Crowpanel, which receives updates over BLE whenever content changes. Since OpenDisplay communicates by sending images, a screenshot service is used to render the info webpage before transmitting it to the display.

Architecture

graph TD
Browser1["Browser\n Admin"] --> |"HTTPS"| Proxy
Browser3["Browser\n Info Display"] --> |"HTTPS"| Proxy
    subgraph nat[NAT]
        Proxy["Reverse Proxy\n Caddy"] --> |"HTTP"| Frontend
        Browser2["Browser\n Visionect Display Management"] --> |"HTTP"| VisionectServer
        Eink["E-Ink Main Display\n Visionect Place & Play 13 "] <--> VisionectServer
        

        subgraph dockernet[Docker Network]
            VisionectServer["Visionect Server\n visionect-server-v3"] --> |"HTTP\n GET /image"| Frontend
            Frontend["Frontend\nAstro / nginx"]
            API["API\nHono / Node.js"]
            Screenshot["screenshot-service\nPlaywright / Node.js"] --> |"HTTP\n GET /info?id=…" | Frontend
            BLE["ble-service\nFastAPI / Python"]
            DB[("SQLite")]
        end

        Frontend -->|"/api/*"| API
        API --- DB
        API -->|"GET /screenshot?url=…"| Screenshot
        API -->|"GET /scan\n PUT /image"| BLE
        BLE -->|"BLE\n OpenDisplay"| Display["E-Ink Info Display\n Crowpanel 2.13"]
    end

    style nat fill:#666
    style dockernet fill:#888

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Screenshots

Living room - main display & info card	Info page - title, description & QR code
Admin - session overview