As we dive additional into house automation and the IOTification of our residing areas, it turns into more and more essential to implement some technique of retaining observe of every little thing. You might need a server someplace that is aware of the state of each machine in your house, your full every day schedule, and every little thing necessary that can occur all through the day, however how a lot good is that doing you in the event you don’t have a straightforward solution to view that that info? Olivier Simard-Hanley’s DailyPi is an easy E Ink house dashboard that may assist.

DailyPi’s giant E Ink display screen sits unobtrusively in an image body, so it’s straightforward to customise to swimsuit a house’s decor. That display screen can show info just like the day’s climate circumstances, duties, machine states, procuring lists, or anything with accessible information that the consumer can entry. It will get its energy from a battery, so it isn’t tethered to the position of shops. And it ought to work with nearly any IoT or house automation ecosystem, as long as the consumer has the requisite programming talent to entry their APIs.

That is intelligent, as a result of the {hardware} is minimal and doesn’t want a lot processing energy. As offered, DailyPi incorporates a Raspberry Pi Zero W. However this might work even with a primary microcontroller that has a WiFi adapter. The show is a Waveshare 7.5” E Ink display screen and energy comes from a PiSugar2 battery module.

The explanation that this works with out a whole lot of processing energy is as a result of the DailyPi machine isn’t doing something apart from downloading and displaying a PNG picture. An online app hosted on Google Cloud Run does the entire actual work. It connects to any related APIs and pulls information from them. Then it generates the PNG picture and makes it accessible at a hard and fast URL. The DailyPi {hardware} solely must verify that URL at common intervals to obtain the brand new picture.

This is a perfect use of cloud computing, as a result of it reduces the load on native {hardware}. A Raspberry Pi Zero W might most likely do the processing with out situation, however DailyPi would additionally work with an ESP8266 — or actually any microcontroller that has Wi-Fi. That might devour far much less energy with none performance sacrifices, thereby growing battery life.