Add ePaper display to Pi

Enabling Waveshare epaper

Purchased a 2.7 inch WaveShare ePaper hat to display output from projects. The setup is well documentation on the waveshare site. The waveshare site contains a working sample. I’ve opted to tweak the sample versus develop something new via super interesting iot extentions to dotnet.

** https://github.com/iogeek/Gardening4Engineers/tree/gh-pages/src/pi/ePaper/screenTest ** https://github.com/iogeek/Gardening4Engineers/tree/gh-pages/src/pi/ePaper/waveshare Here are the tweaks I made to the waveshare sample.

• Installed latest BCM2835 driver (vs version described on WaveShare)
• Removed uneeded files from Waveshare sample. Ex python, arduino, etc
• Trimmed makefile and added capability to build shared libary
• Added fonts (see tips on FontEdit below)

Getting your own fonts

FontEdit made getting fonts as simple as cut and paste.

• Be sure the “reverse bits (MSB)” is checked.
• See font48.c and font36.c for fonts I used FontEdit to create. Take a look at fonts.h for how the new font datastructures were added.

Adding the “Custom” Library

The code I made creates a custom library from the Waveshare sample. This libary needs to be built, copied to a known location, and add the location to the search path.

• Make clean && makefile libary
• Copy libepd.so to /home/pi/libs
• add path to sudo vi /etc/ld.so.conf
• sudo ldconfig to reload paths
• dotnet run test

## Notes: I have come across libraries that write to ePaper in c#. Things to consider in the future.

• https://github.com/eXoCooLd/Waveshare.EPaperDisplay
• https://github.com/paw3lx/EPaperHatCore