media-screen

/ 2022-01-09 / Projects

I've been using a Raspberry Pi 3 for years with a DAC HAT connected to a pair of powered monitors. I thought it was time to upgrade to a Raspberry Pi 4. This time, I opted for a USB DAC: the MOTU M4. I also wanted to hide the Raspberry Pi behind a display. The Waveshare 3.7 e-ink display seemed to cover the whole Raspberry Pi and also attach to it nicely. It has support for partial refreshes and is fairly fast at updating the whole screen. It sits on top of the MOTU M4 and shows some music information (from LastFM's API) like track name, album, artist, play count and the time of day. For now, I'm not using the partial refresh, but plan to in the future. Instead, I only update the screen once a track changes (so the time is usually lagging a few minutes). The Python code can be found here: media screen.

Front view.
Example of screen update.
Top view (left) and side view (right).
Close-up view.