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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.
ESPresso Frame
A DIY e-ink photo frame: an ESP32-C6 pulls photos from your Immich library and displays them on a 7.3" full-color e-paper panel, waking on a timer to refresh and spending the rest of its time in deep sleep.
- No cables to a computer, no SD card shuffling. Provisioning is a captive portal with a QR code drawn on the panel itself -- scan, join, fill in your WiFi and server address, done.
- The frame never decodes an image. A small self-hosted server does all the work (pulling from Immich, cropping, dithering, packing into the panel's exact pixel format) and hands the device a stream it can write straight to SPI. The ESP32-C6 has no PSRAM and not much SRAM to spare -- keeping it a dumb display client is what makes that workable.
- Crops toward faces, not just the center, using face bounding boxes Immich already computed for its own People feature -- no bundled face detector.
- Refresh interval and album are configurable from a web UI, no reflashing needed to change them.
Hardware
- ESP32-C6 dev board (8MB flash)
- Waveshare 7.3" E Ink Spectra 6 (E6) panel -- 800x480, 6-color, SPI
See docs/hardware.md for wiring,
docs/architecture.md for how the two halves talk
to each other, and docs/widgets.md for the server's
placeable photos/calendar/whiteboard widget system.
Getting started
server/-- run the FastAPI server first (Docker Compose, points at your Immich instance). Seeserver/README.md.firmware/-- build and flash the ESP32-C6, then scan the QR codes it draws on first boot to provision it. Seefirmware/README.md.
Repo layout
firmware/ ESP-IDF project for the ESP32-C6
server/ FastAPI server: Immich -> crop/dither/pack -> the frame
docs/ Wiring and architecture notes
License
MIT -- see LICENSE. A few small pieces of vendored
third-party code (a QR code generator, a bitmap font table) keep their
own permissive licenses; see LICENSE for details.
Built with substantial assistance from Claude Code.