I've always wanted to display our family calendar in a central location, like in the kitchen. Various options exist, but a powered display really limits where you can place something, and I never liked the way it would look.
When I saw the OpenEPaperLink project, I had to try it out. Here's the end result:
The hardware I purchased for this:
- OpenEPaperLink Mini-AP v3 as a base station
- 4.2" epaper tag for the screen
These things are surprisingly affordable for what they offer. The rest of the project is all software, primarily Home Assistant. The more I've used Home Assistant, the more I'm impressed with the amazing community surrounding it.
The things I had to install in Home Assistant:
- Google Calendar home assistant integration: this allows you to pull information from your Google Calendar, which imports it to home assistant as Calendar entities.
- OpenEPaperLink home assistant integration: this detects the OpenEPaperLink hub on your network and adds devices for each of the displays. It then exposes a service call you can use to send data.
- Home Assistant Node-RED: this integrates Node-RED into home assistant, which is a flow-based programming interface. It's much more flexible than Home Assistant's built-in yaml-based routines. In particular, it has the ability to execute JavaScript code during a flow, which is necessary to transform the data (more on this later).
Once this was all set up and configured, I could create the Node-RED flow. Here's what the overall flow looks like:
The first step in the flow is an Inject node, which is configured to trigger the flow once an hour.
The next step is a call service node which calls calendar.get_events. This is a new method, which replaces calendar.list_events, which doesn't seem to be documented yet. The parameters I pass get all calendar events in the next 4 days, starting from 3 hours ago:
{/* 3 hours ago */"start_date_time": $fromMillis(
$millis() - 1000 * 60 * 60 * 3),
"duration": {"days": 4}}
The output gets piped into a function node. This is really the only code I had to write for this. Instead of inlining it here, I placed it in a gist here.
The script takes the message payload output from the calendar service call, parses the dates and times, has some special handling for multi-day events, formats the dates and events in a custom format, and then transforms it into the output payload format expected by the open_epaper_link.drawcustom service call.
Next, I wanted to prevent the display from refreshing unnecessarily. I piped the output of my function into a Filter node. This conveniently has a mode where you can stop the flow if the input doesn't change. E Ink devices only consume a lot of power when the display changes. However, the way the open_epaper_link.drawcustom service call works is it renders into an image, which then gets sent to the display. If you send the same image twice, it still consumes power. To prevent refreshing the display when not necessary, the whole flow gets stopped by this filter node if what's being displayed doesn't change.
The next step is a call service node again, this time with open_epaper_link.drawcustom as the target. The parameter this time is very simple, {"payload": payload}, since my function outputs in the payload format expected by the service call.
That's it! Now I have an auto updating E Ink display that shows my calendar. I bought a few more of these E Ink displays to play around with, so I'll hopefully be adding more!
