Building a e ink digital picture frame with the Raspberry Pi Pico and Rust

A couple of years ago when talking to a friend, we had the idea to build a digital picture frame that always showed the dankest memes from r/dankmemes and r/me_irl.

I got to work and ordered a small tft monitor for one of the PI's I had lying around. I made a website (https://dankmeme-gallery.web.app/) that displayed a slideshow of hot dank memes from reddit and made that website show in a fullscreen Chrome window on the PI. It worked, but it sucked because the display had shitty viewing angles and it probably used a ton of energy and always had to be plugged in.

We recently discussed if it would be possible to build a better version of the meme display nowadays and to my surprise I discovered that there are color E-Ink displays now. These can display 7 different colors, which might sound limiting, compared to the 16.7 million colors a typical modern monitor can show but if we use dithering the results look pretty nice (when not looking too close).

Dithered Version of https://malmal.io/gallery/143538
Dithered Version of omg poor cow by nefi

Parts list

Since the Inky Impression was sold out everywhere in Germany and I wanted to use the PI Pico I chose the Waveshare e-Paper Module. But the Inky would've also been fine, and they also offer a Pi Pico version.

Other Parts:

The battery, holder and charger circuit are optional but it's nice if the frame doesn't need a wire connected.