A simple tool for rendering web pages to E-Ink® displays that are supported by the inky library. More than likely you would run this on a Raspberry Pi.

The tool spawns a long-lived browser using the playwright library, and takes screenshots at a regular interval to render to the display. Hence, you can easily test your webpage in an ordinary browser before pointing this tool towards it.

The tool will by default not ever refresh the page; it is assumed that the page will dynamically update, using for example Javascript or video. I might implement refreshing if I ever end up needing that, though...

Run with poetry, like poetry run inky-dashboard. You might need to install playwright browsers with poetry run playwright install the first time; this will download self-contained headless browsers.

The program takes command-line flags, use -h for more info. The only mandatory argument is the URL to open, like so:

$ inky-dashboard https://google.com

I'd recommend using pipx for installation. You will need to install playwright browsers in the relevant virtualenv that was created.

To install for your own user only:

$ pipx install <path to inky-dashboard>
-- OR --
$ pipx install git+https://github.com/dflemstr/inky-dashboard
$ source /home/dflemstr/.local/pipx/venvs/inky-dashboard/bin/activate
$ playwright install

You can also install the tool globally (for all users) using this hack:

$ sudo PIPX_HOME=/var/lib/pipx PIPX_BIN_DIR=/usr/local/bin pipx install <path to inky-dashboard>
-- OR --
$ sudo PIPX_HOME=/var/lib/pipx PIPX_BIN_DIR=/usr/local/bin pipx install git+https://github.com/dflemstr/inky-dashboard
$ sudo -s
# source /var/lib/pipx/venvs/inky-dashboard/bin/activate
# playwright install

This also lets you run the tool as a systemd-managed service:

$ cat /etc/systemd/system/inky-dashboard.service 
[Unit]
Description=Inky Dashboard

[Service]
Type=exec
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/inky-dashboard <add args here>
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

$ sudo systemctl enable --now inky-dashboard.service