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Two rounds of follow-up work on the manage-button overlay:
1. Location formatting: US/Canada now show abbreviated state/province
("CA", "ON") instead of the full name, other countries show the full
country name, and each is its own line (was one line, now wraps to
two) so longer international place names have more room without
threatening to overlap the top-right QR box. The bottom-left share QR
also gets a "SCAN TO DOWNLOAD" caption.
2. Escalating menu: pressing the manage button again while its overlay
is already up adds a second level -- each Immich-identified person's
name labeled next to their face in the photo (using Immich's own
face recognition/People data, no detection/recognition added to this
project). A third press exits immediately instead of waiting out the
30s auto-revert timer. No new Immich API needed -- GET /api/faces
already embeds a nullable person.name per face; new
server/app/face_labels.py maps a named face's box into the final
800x480 frame's pixel space (reusing crop-box math extracted from
image_pipeline.py's face-aware cropping). Capped at 4 named faces,
sized to a real firmware RAM budget: each label is its own malloc'd
overlay region on the device, alongside the 4 fixed corner regions
already in use. New GET /frame/face-labels returns a flattened
fixed-slot JSON shape (not a real array) so firmware's existing
flat-scalar parser can read it without needing an actual array
parser. No persistent state needed for the escalation itself -- it's
all local control flow within one continuous awake session
(frame_client.c's run_management_menu()).
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 and
docs/architecture.md for how the two halves talk
to each other.
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.