Following on from our post The Internet of Things – creating a user guide for a fridge door, we came across other ways to create e-ink digital user guides that could be attached to the door of meeting rooms, providing information on room bookings, using the equipment in the room etc.
AdaFruit RePaper 2.7″ Graphic eInk display
The video below, from 2013, shows AdaFruit’s RePaper 2.7″ Graphic eInk display connected to a Raspberry Pi Model A.
The 2.7′ display costs £43.
Raspberry Pis support wifi, with a dongle, and run on Linux. You’d have it booting up to a web page displaying your information. In November 2014, the Model A+ replaced the original Model A shown in the video above, and costs £15. Instead of the Raspberry Pi Model A, you could probably use the newer and smaller Raspberry Pi Zero, which costs £4. With a 5V USB voltage booster module, both models could be run from AA or LiPo batteries.
PaPiRus
PaPiRus is an ePaper Screen Hardware Attached on Top (HAT) board for a Raspberry Pi. They cost £30-£65 (for the 2.7″ display). Again this should probably work with a Raspberry Pi Zero.
In comparison, the SeeNote costs $99, and comes with a 6″ display.
These Raspberry Pi-based solutions are more complex from a hardware perspective, as they don’t come ready built. However, the software side would be relatively trivial (launch a web page when powering up or rebooting).
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