tiny-info-screen

Display local electricity prices for the coming few hours on a small e-paper display. The idea is to make it easy to see when it's least expensive to charge our cars.

Setup

Raspberry Pi Setup

First, install system dependencies:

./bin/setup-raspberry-pi

This installs required libraries for Pillow, fonts, and the InkyPHAT display.

Manual Setup

Create and activate virtual environment:

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

Install requirements:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Run

Development mode (saves to PNG):

python3 main.py --dev

Production mode (displays on InkyPHAT):

python3 main.py

Or use the helper script:

./bin/update-display

Scheduled Updates (Cron)

To automatically update the display every hour on a Raspberry Pi:

1. Edit your crontab:

crontab -e

2. Add this line to run every hour at 5 minutes past:

5 * * * * /home/jtj/tiny-info-screen/bin/update-display >> /home/jtj/tiny-info-screen/cron.log 2>&1

The display will now update automatically every hour at 5 minutes past. Check cron.log for any errors.

Development

Use this to re-execute whenever the file changes:

while inotifywait -e close_write main.py; do python3 ./main.py --dev; done