ePaper Calendar

I had a couple of these small ePaper boards, bought on sale a while ago, begging to be used in a project… I wasn’t sure what to do with them, until I saw James’ video about his message board.

Then it occurred to me: a small, ePaper display for my Google Calendar would be perfect ! True, we all check our phones regularly, almost compulsively, nowadays, but still, there’s nothing like having your tasks/appointments on a piece of paper ! Even if it’s of the “e” variety… 🙂

Especially if it’s for the shared family calendar, so that my wife and kids can also have it right there in front on them in the kitchen!

These are the boards I mentioned earlier.

ESP32 based which means super easy WiFi connectivity, LiPo battery charger/management included and they even have a SD Card slot, which I’m not using for this project.

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While writing the code for this project (see my repository for all the details) I also discovered the benefits of Hardware/JTAG debugging (using and ESP-PROG board).

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I historically had been working with 8bit Arduino/Atmel boards/chips which didn’t have this feature (neither the MCUs nor the IDE) but this time I got fed up with debugging HTTP redirection issues and realised that these were super powerful, 2 cores, 32 bits processors, running some pretty complex libraries both for WiFi itself and HTTP, so I had to move up and improve my “game”…

It turns out there was a bug in the HTTPClient library from espressif/arduino-esp32 , which I fixed and currently awaiting to be merged to master.

Here are a few more pictures of the final product:

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