The weather widget's icons/layout are hand-drawn PIL primitives -- clean
under quantization but flat, no gradients/shadows. Adds an opt-in
render_style="modern" (current/daily modes only) that instead renders a
Jinja2 template through a persistent headless-Chromium browser
(app/html_render.py), following the approach of Tesserae, an open-source
e-ink dashboard targeting this same panel family.
Key design points:
- The Chromium dependency (Playwright) is lazily imported only when a
weather widget actually uses "modern" style, and the background browser
itself only launches on first use -- every other widget type, and this
one's own classic/hourly/multi_city paths, never pay for it.
- No Frame-level dithering setting needed: html_render dithers its own
rendered widget to exact palette colors (Bayer/ordered, not
Floyd-Steinberg) before compositing, so the shared whole-canvas
Floyd-Steinberg pass sees zero quantization error there and leaves it
untouched -- same trick draw_text/hand-drawn icons already use. Floyd-
Steinberg keeps working unchanged for photos and every other widget.
- A "Load calibrated Spectra 6 preset" button in Advanced configuration
offers a community-measured palette (data ported from
paperlesspaper/epdoptimize, Apache 2.0) as an alternative starting
point to the existing idealized DEFAULT_PALETTE_RGB -- fills the
existing palette table, doesn't save by itself.
Known open risk, not resolved here: a headless Chromium binary is far
larger than the ~100MB single-layer limit that already forced this
project's pip/npm installs into split layers, and (unlike those) is a
single ~180MB file that can't be split across layers by ordinary
Dockerfile restructuring. Flagged prominently in server/Dockerfile and
docs/widgets.md -- treat this render style as experimental/local-only
until that's resolved.
DEFAULT_PALETTE_RGB was a guessed approximation of the panel's ink
colors (pure sRGB primaries); swap in epdoptimize's measured spectra6
palette instead, which is far more muted/darker, matching how these
inks actually look.
_quantize now matches against the palette in OKLab space (perceptual
distance) instead of PIL's raw-RGB quantize(), with lightness weighted
down relative to hue/chroma when selecting the nearest color -- this
palette's inks are lit so differently from their sRGB namesakes
(muted dark red, bright yellow) that unweighted distance let lightness
dominate and mismatch hue (pure red nearest "yellow").
Dithering switched from Floyd-Steinberg error diffusion to a Bayer
ordered dither: true error diffusion is an inherently serial per-pixel
loop, and doing that in pure Python for a full 800x480 panel took
~1s, blowing past the render-latency budget the "render widgets
concurrently" fix (previous commit) exists to protect. The ordered
dither finds each pixel's true nearest and second-nearest palette
color and mixes between them (via projection onto that segment, not
distance ratio) using a tiled Bayer threshold -- fully vectorized, no
Python-level pixel loop.
A new widget type showing a single user-uploaded image with no live
upstream to poll -- decoded once at upload time (PDF's first page via
pypdfium2, BSD-3-Clause/Apache-2.0, no copyleft exposure) into plain RGB
PNG bytes, then composed per a crop/stretch/letterbox display mode like
the photos widget.
Calendar rule/grid lines were light gray, which dithers away to
near-invisible on the 6-color e-ink palette -- now black.
CalDAV accounts (Nextcloud, Fastmail, iCloud, ...) can now be linked
alongside the existing single ICS subscription, since one account can
expose several calendars. A frame's Calendar tab now lists calendars
per person rather than one opt-in per person: your own row shows every
calendar you have available with a full add/remove toggle, while other
linked users' rows show only calendars they've included, toggleable
off (mute) but not on -- only a calendar's owner can add it to a
shared frame. FrameCalendar replaces the old single-boolean
UserFrame.calendar_included; existing opt-ins are migrated forward.
calendar_feed.py/calendar_render.py: fetch/merge per-user ICS feeds,
render agenda/week/month views. manage_overlay.py: composites the
manage-button overlay server-side (QR, battery, location/date,
share-QR, face labels), reused by every render mode. device.py/common.py
wire both together: mode dispatch for /frame/image+advance+back, and
the &manage=1 flag. Plus UI (frame_config.html Calendar card, settings
calendar URL field) and the icalendar/recurring-ical-events deps.
The frame-claiming pipeline, end to end. Firmware: every request now
carries ?id=<12-hex STA MAC> via build_url (mirrored in build_ota_url),
and the captive portal's success page became a redirect that hands the
user's browser to <server>/claim?device_id=... after ~7s -- enough time
for the phone to drop the provisioning AP while the device reboots.
The server pushes a per-frame device token through /frame/config during
a one-time handshake; the firmware persists it to NVS (a dedicated
single-key write that deliberately doesn't reset the connected-once
flag or WiFi cache) and prefers it over the provisioned shared token
from the next request on. Config response buffer grows 256->512. Both
board variants compile clean; new firmware also works against an old
server (which ignores ?id=) and old firmware against this server (the
phase A legacy mapping), so either deploy order survives.
Server: /claim lands the captive-portal redirect -- claim-gated signup
(a valid unclaimed/unregistered device id IS the enrollment invitation),
pending claims for the user-beats-the-frame race (auto-attached at
self-registration, 24h expiry), and a waiting page that refreshes until
the frame checks in. Unclaimed/unconfigured frames get a rendered
instruction placeholder with a QR from /frame/image (200, never an
error loop) -- new qrcode dep, placeholder shares the exact
quantize/pack path photos use.
The on-frame manage QR now resolves to a limited no-login page: scans
of / carrying device credentials (new ?id&token or the legacy shared
token) 303 to /m/<manage_token>, which allows exactly view queue,
show-next, advance, back, and scoped thumbnails -- no settings, no
removal, no other frames. Full control means logging in.
One real protocol hole found by simulating full wake cycles: after
self-registration the device could never authenticate again (the wake
cycle fetches the image BEFORE /frame/config delivers its token).
require_device now treats the id itself as the credential until the
first authenticated request flips device_token_ack -- the same trust
level as open registration, closing permanently once the handshake
completes.
Replaces the single global config.json (whole-file pydantic model under
one RLock) with SQLite via SQLAlchemy 2.0: users/sessions/frames/links/
pending-claims/battery_log tables (models.py), a per-frame lock registry
(db.frame_locked) succeeding config.locked(), and hand-rolled schema
versioning (migration.py). A pre-database deployment's config.json is
imported verbatim as frame #1 on first boot and left untouched as the
rollback path; the old single firmware.bin slot becomes per-frame
firmware/<id>.bin.
Routes split out of the 900-line main.py into routers/device.py (the
frozen /frame/* protocol) and routers/api.py (web UI, still on the old
single-frame paths for now). Device auth moves to require_device, which
already speaks the full multi-frame protocol: per-frame device tokens
pushed via /frame/config and acknowledged on first use, self-
registration of unknown device ids as unclaimed frames, pending-claim
attachment, and the legacy-token migration window that keeps the
currently-deployed firmware (no id, shared MANAGEMENT_TOKEN) resolving
to frame #1 -- including the one-time binding of its device id when it
first reports one after a future OTA.
Externally identical for existing deployments: same paths, same token
semantics, same response shapes -- verified with a migration fixture,
the legacy-device curl suite, a 20-way concurrent-advance smoke test,
and a mutate-restart-assert persistence check against a fake Immich.
photo_queue.py ports nearly verbatim onto the Frame ORM row (MutableList
JSON columns make its in-place list mutations dirty-track); quiet-hours
math extracted unchanged into quiet_hours.py.
- pillow==11.1.0 has no prebuilt wheel for Python 3.14, so pip fell back
to building from source and failed without libjpeg dev headers
installed. Bumped to 12.3.0 (has wheels); re-ran the local test suite
against it with no other changes needed.
- The local-dev uvicorn command in the README was missing --host 0.0.0.0,
so it defaulted to 127.0.0.1 -- unreachable from the ESP32 on the LAN.
The Docker image already binds 0.0.0.0 correctly; only the doc'd local
command was wrong.
Implements the server side of the architecture decided on: the ESP32-C6
has no PSRAM and a tight RAM budget, so all the heavy lifting (JPEG
decode, resize, Floyd-Steinberg dithering, 6-color quantization, 4bpp
packing) happens here instead of on-device. The frame just does a single
GET and streams the response straight to SPI.
- GET /frame/image: looks up the current cursor's asset in the configured
Immich album, downloads its preview thumbnail, and returns it packed
into the panel's exact 800x480/4bpp/2px-per-byte format
(application/octet-stream, always exactly 192,000 bytes).
- GET / + POST /api/config + GET /api/albums: a small web UI for entering
the Immich URL/API key and picking an album, rather than cramming that
into the ESP32's captive portal form.
- Config (Immich creds, selected album, cursor) persists to a JSON file
via a docker-compose volume mount.
Verified locally with a venv (Docker isn't available in this environment):
unit-tested image_pipeline against a synthetic image (exact byte count,
valid panel color codes only), and ran a full end-to-end pass against a
mock Immich HTTP server exercising the real /frame/image path.
Pinned dependency versions in requirements.txt after hitting a real bug
with unpinned floors: the latest starlette (1.3.1) resolved by `pip
install fastapi` breaks Jinja2Templates outright.
Not yet wired to the ESP32 side (task 6) or authenticated -- /frame/image
is unauthenticated for now, fine on a trusted LAN but worth revisiting
once the firmware sends a shared device token.
tfaour
Thomas Faour