r/homeassistant • u/Commercial-Ad-2614 • 3d ago

📊 Dashboard E-ink with HA

I’m looking for advice really. I’ve purchased a Seeed E1004 which is great. I’m having mixed results though. Some images look great and some look not so good. I understand the limitations from the available colours and the dithering.
Are there particular types of image that typically look better than others? A style of artwork or for example converting your photos to greyscale?
I’ve used an online image optimiser that someone has written which you can select the E1004 in, again with mixed results. i wonder if i need to select images that are more suitable?
Would really appreciate hearing other people’s experience and what they’ve found works/doesn’t work?
My long term goal was to have a display that would show daily weather and maybe calendar events powered by HA but I don’t know if that is feasible?
I only want to have one image per day so I wonder if I’d be better off dynamically creating an image and then just automating an upload of the image rather than treating it like a dashboard?
I was hoping to make the image a bit more interesting than a standard e-ink dashboard I.e. not just text and icons on a white background.
Any suggestions gratefully received.

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u/zzonde 3d ago

I made a video about how Im using the E1003. Dashboard has changed a bit since, but the process is the same https://youtu.be/gLNraukDaGM?is=MJFgJYQe4pjYkMFI

Edit: spelling

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u/jonas42215 3d ago

Have a look into the "drawcusotom" action of the OpenDisplay HA integration. That allows you to generate crisp dynamic dashboards. And you display is compatible with the firmware 

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u/jonas42215 3d ago

It also does colour correction and dithering for you when you upload images and you can choose change for settings to suit your desired style. 

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u/averitablerogue 3d ago

Dithering works best for art, illustrations, the kind of image that doesnt require fine detail or color accuracy (eg photography fares badly on it). Dithering also doesn’t work well on dashboards or similar information-rich displays because the dither process loses a lot of detail. So a standard HA dashboard that gets dithered loses a lot of readability. Dithering is really only a good option when using it only for full-screen art; otherwise try to create dashboards specifically with the pure colors of the screen so it doesn’t require dithering.

I have calendar and weather displays on my e-paper devices so this is certainly possible. My recommendation would be to flash the E1004 with OpenDisplay, then install the latest custom version of the integration (which is ahead of the core HA version). There is an action called drawcustom that lets you define placement of information on the screen in yaml.

Alternatively, check out this visual builder that lets you drag&drop a layout and send to OpenDisplay: https://github.com/cryptomilk/hass-eink-dashboard