Building a Strava dashboard on a Raspberry Pi with an e-ink display

Let’s face it: my purchase of the Pimoroni Inky Impression 5.7 inch display was a solution looking for a problem. I saw a video about it and I was sold on the idea of having an e-ink display on one of my Raspberry Pi’s.

While having a 7-colour e-ink display is cool and all, I had to come up with a good plan to utilize one. So it wouldn’t end up in a drawer after a short experiment.

You can use it to display images, but it is 7-colour. So you have to “dither” full colour images to have it display well. Actually comic book style images are displayed much better than the average dithered photo. The resolution is quite low (600×448) and the refresh rate is quite slow (10-20 seconds). But for some applications this is just fine.

Ideas

Applications, like some kind of data display. Here are a couple of ideas I’ve been thinking of:

• A display with upcoming appointments.
• A todo list
• A short list of recent space and astronomy news articles.
• A dashboard showing my cycling statistics.

For a first try I decided to create a simple dashboard with cycling stats. In this and upcoming blogposts I will tell how I created it.

Tutorial

Because I’m going to share this on non technical sites, I think I have to explain a thing or two about the Raspberry Pi. Even so, this blogpost series will require some advanced technical knowledge, the most complex of which will be how to run Linux shell commands from the terminal (command prompt).

Part 1: Setting up the Raspberry Pi

Part 2: Install the software to use Inky Impression

Part 3: How to retrieve Strava data via the Strava API.

Part 4: How to draw with Pillow on Inky Impression