Building an eInk Newspaper Display

Posted: Oct 25, 2024

During the pandemic I put together a large, wall-mounted eink display that shows the front page of newspapers from around the world, rotating automatically every half hour. It looks like this:

The idea

I can't take credit for the concept. I think I first saw Google engineer Max Braun's post about creating a large eink-based newspaper display in 2020. He did a nice job, but it also looked pretty labor intensive. It was Alexander Klöpping's version that inspired me to actually build one thanks to the expensive but very nice eink platform he found:

In my search for sellers of e-ink devices, I discovered a company from Slovenia called Visionect that sells e-ink screens for corporate use. Known in some circles for their Joan office screens that show whether a meeting room is available or not, they also sell larger screens for use in, for example, airports (to show flight times) and hotels (to provide conference room overviews).

It turns out, the screen they sell for corporate use is a perfect match to the proportions of an unfolded New York Times. The Place & Play 32 inch is a pricey (2300 euros) but very beautiful piece of hardware. It’s made of stainless steel with sharp edges and a glass panel on top. The USB connectors are nicely hidden and the device feels sturdy.

(Alexander now appears to sell a version that generates an AI image of stories from Hacker News, which I don't think I would want but is an interesting idea.)

How it works

The Visionect panel ain't cheap but the hardware is great and they give you a nice ecosystem for building what you want. It comes with a wifi module and connects to Visionect Server software that tells it what to display. I'm self-hosting that on a $50 Inovato Quadra that lives under a desk in my office. You could also run it on a cloud server or a Raspberry Pi or nearly anywhere else with enough memory and the ability to run Docker. (One bummer is that Visionect has since decided that this server software, which is necessary to use their panels, requires a $72/year license even if you self-host.)

And then I've got some really hacky software I wrote to download a newspaper PDF, rasterize it into an image the correct dimensions for the panel, overlay some metadata at the bottom, and then send it to the local Visionect server. Which in turn pushes it to the eink board as a big HTTP Push image. (Visionect software also supports built-in webkit rendering of files and pages, but I found it to be pretty janky and the image quality not as good.) The code runs on that same little Quadra box every half hour.

I plan to rewrite and clean up the software Real Soon Now, but happy to help if you want to get it running and have questions. The key thing for me was getting it to run as a Docker container because I use the Quadra for other stuff and the dependencies are a little tricky to get right.

Putting it all together

The Visionect board looks pretty slick out of the box, but I didn't like having their logo silkscreened on the bezel nor the aesthetics of one side of the bezel being a little thicker than the other.

I brought it to Allen Custom Frame here in DC and they built me a really cool frame that looks great from the front but leaves the VESA mount on the back exposed.

Then the last piece was attaching an ultra-low-profile VESA mount from Monoprice to the wall.

It looks great and the battery lasts about a month between charges with updates set to every half hour. I plan to put a recessed outlet behind it so that battery isn't a concern at all.