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

1. server/ -- run the FastAPI server first (Docker Compose, points at your Immich instance). See server/README.md.
2. firmware/ -- build and flash the ESP32-C6, then scan the QR codes it draws on first boot to provision it. See firmware/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.

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Built with substantial assistance from Claude Code.