Playing with e-ink

This is a very good price for electricity..

I’m making a little device that shows the prices of the Agile Octopus Tariff. I’ve got it working on an LCD panel and today I thought I’d get it going on an e-ink device. The one I’m using is made by Pimoroni. You plug your PICO or PICO-W into the back, load up their code and off it goes. I’m really impressed by the quality of the display, although it can take quite a while to update.

The display above shows the current price per kilowatt/hour and a little histogram showing how the price will change for the remainder of the day. It turns out that the important thing with e-ink displays is to minimise the number of redraws that you do. I’ve made a little set of display items which manage their particular elements and only redraw when their contents change. All the code will be upon GitHub once I’ve made it work.