The MagInkCal Goes Upscale, as Its Creator Moves to an Impressive 31.5" E Ink Spectra 6 Display
If you're willing to spend "well in excess of $1,000" on a smart calendar display, this is what you'd get.
Pseudonymous maker "speedyg0nz" has unveiled the final form for their ePaper "magic dashboard" project, and it's a big upgrade — literally, now being based around a 31.5" E Ink Spectra 6 color display, yet still running from an on-board battery.
"For those who have followed my work on MagInkCal and MagInkDash over the past few years, I'm excited to share what I've been working on recently," speedyg0nz says. "The MagInkCal has gotten a massive upgrade in size and now uses a 31.5" E Ink Spectra 6 Color display. With the upgraded size, it can finally serve as a proper wall calendar for the entire family. This [will] likely be the final form of MagInkCal for some time to come."
The original MagInkCal project, unveiled back in October 2021, was inspired by Google's Android Magic Calendar concept — brought to life by pairing a 12.48" three-color ePaper display with a Raspberry Pi Zero and some custom software. This initial version gave way to the MagInkDash in April 2023, which expanded beyond a simple calendar to deliver a "glanceable" dashboard with weather, scheduling, and even a daily fact generated by OpenAI's ChatGPT large language model (LLM).
The MagInkCal Plus, though, goes big — literally. The base of the build is a Geniatech 31.5" six-color ePaper display designed for low-power commercial signage, based on E Ink's Spectra 6 platform and driven from a bundled Rockchip-based single-board computer running Google's Android. "Instead of porting my entire solution to Android," speedyg0nz notes, "I chose to keep it simple for now. Currently, a Raspberry Pi acts as the server, periodically running a Python script to retrieve calendar events from a Google Calendar.
"The events are then formatted using HTML/CSS and rendered as an image to be served on the Apache HTTP server that runs on the [Raspberry] Pi too. On the display side, I wrote a simple Android app to retrieve the image from the [Raspberry] Pi server upon boot, refresh the display, schedule the next boot-up/refresh timing, before shutting down the Android OS to conserve battery."
As the display, like all electrophoretic displays, keeps displaying its contents even without power, that means an impressive battery life given the size: "I'm looking at less than 0.5% battery use each time the display boots up, refreshes the screen, and shuts down," speedyg0nz claims. "Currently, I'm refreshing it every 6 hours, so that works out to around a couple of months (hopefully more) before I need to charge."
The only catch: large-format ePaper displays aren't cheap, particularly if you want color. "The 31.5" display itself is priced well in excess of $1,000," the maker admits. "This means that a project like this will only be accessible to a select few, who are willing and able to afford it. As for purchasing the display, it's currently not possible to do so directly from Geniatech's website since Geniatech is more of a B2B company. You'll have to reach out to their sales channel directly if you wish to purchase a single unit."
A detailed write-up is available in speedyg0nz Reddit post.