This DIY e-paper show performs motion pictures in extremely gradual movement and would take years to play one again utterly

There appears to be a bizarre obsession with tremendous gradual film gamers recently. I’ve seen a couple of of them come scroll up my display recently, however this one’s… Properly, it kinda takes the cake, with a brand new body being rendered about each half an hour. And it makes use of nearly no energy so as to have the ability to do it, too. It’s based mostly off an ESP32 in “Deep Sleep” mode and attracts about 12uA (that’s 0.000012 Amps!). It’s projected that its 2,000mAh battery ought to final… oh, about 1.2 years.

It’s an fascinating option to have a sort of continuously altering picture body, that progresses one body by way of a video sequence at a time in extraordinarily gradual style. One body each half-hour would signifies that a film like The Matrix (simply the primary one, not the entire trilogy) would take simply over eleven years to look at in its entirety. In real-time, the length of The Matrix is about 2 hours and 16 minutes.

It was developed by the Hackaday person likeablob, and makes use of the ESP32 module in Deep Sleep mode, solely waking up as usually because it must with a purpose to refresh the body – and even then it offloads many of the work to its Extremely Low Energy (ULP) coprocessor. Refreshing the body on the Waveshare ACeP 7-colour e-paper show takes about 35 seconds as a result of e-paper isn’t all that fast to replace. However what e-paper does do is maintain and show a picture with out requiring any energy by any means as soon as it’s absolutely acquired it.

The gradual refresh time of the show isn’t actually an element whenever you’re solely updating the body each half an hour or so. Whereas enjoying motion pictures on it would not likely be all that sensible, it does make for a neat idea as a digital picture body that might actually run for years on a small battery with out ever repeating the identical picture.

If you wish to have a go at constructing your personal, you’ll find extra info on Hackaday and obtain all of the code and CAD recordsdata on GitHub.

[via Hackaday]