• 1
    Choose a Setup (Battery / External Powered)

    As this device will be sitting on my desk, in theory you do not need a battery to make it works. The reason I decided to add a battery is that the only power source around my table is my PC, and I don't want to have a spare USB charger occupying another wall socket space.

    In my setup, the calendar is plugged into my PC USB port with a USB extension cable of around 1.5 meters. A standard USB port output around 5V 500mA (and probably less with a cheap USB extension cable). A 3.7v 1000mAh LiPo inside the eink calendar can act as a power buffer. Hence, the system won't goes under voltage during the eink refresh (eink only consume power when the screen refresh) . This design also comes with a benefit for my use case as well for continue powering the e-ink calendar at night and in early morning when my PC is not turned on.

    That being said, build-in battery is optional here and your eink calendar will work perfectly fine without one.

  • 2
    Wiring the MCU to Your Eink Display

    If you go with the hacker route, you can wire your ESP8266 (Wemos D1 mini) according to the following table.

    • BUSY -> D2
    • RST -> D4
    • DC -> D3
    • CS -> D8
    • CLK -> D5
    • DIN -> D7
    • GND -> GND
    • 3.3V -> 3.3V

    The left side is the e-ink SPI adapter pins and the right side is the Wemos D1 pin. As the Wemos D1 pins are design for general purpose usage, after wiring you will get a wire spaghettii like the one I show in the photo.

  • 3
    Make a PCB (Optional)

    If you are like me and go for the technical-maker route, you can use the following gerber files and get a custom PCB made. You can find the PCB Gerber files here.

    https://git.imuslab.com/TC/InkyDash/src/master/pcb

    This board is basically a TP4056 module and a Wemos D1 integrated into one. Then I route the SPI required GPIO from the Esp12F and make connection to the adapter board easier. In term of circuitry and connections, it is basically identical to the previous steps with an extra switch for controlling if the battery is used for powering or the USB port is use for powering.