From left to right, there is a Waveshare 2.13" e-ink hat, a GrovePi+, and a Velleman 3.5" resistive touch screen.
One of the things I have wanted to do with Charlie is to add some kind of display and/or input device so that Charlie could report status and/or accept input while running headless.
The Vellemann resistive touch screen was one of my first attempts to do this. Unfortunately, the results were less than spectacular.
Since then, I have recently bought a Waveshare e-ink panel that I want to try.
The GrovePi+ is simple curiosity.
I have been wondering about the Grove pi, since we seem to get a bunch of questions about it periodically.
So! I bought one. I’m not sure what I am going to do with it yet, but it will be interesting!
The house is quite small, (the equivalent of a two bedroom apartment), and is already too noisy. And maybe I don’t want a noisy, chatty robot?
Also, (with a bit of luck), I can use the display device as an input device.
Speach is slow. I can read faster than I can hear. Likewise I can display more data, (even on a small screen), than I can reasonably expect Charlie to speak.
Lastly, (though it doesn’t allow input), the e-ink display’s display images will survive a power failure or hard crash allowing me to see what happened just before Charlie died.
Also e-ink doesn’t use much battery power, (μ-amps), unless actually refreshing the screen.
Clincher:
I can get these without having to bribe half the Kremlin. Monkmakes, on the other hand, is relatively difficult to find.
Saw an article today on “battery-less circuit-python driving an e-ink display” where even the Python script sleeps till enough power is recovered from solar or device motion.
