Compatible with Impression 7"?

[kedare]

Hello.

Thank you for your library :)

Do you know if it would be compatible with the Impression 7" ? I would really love to avoid using Python for my project on it.

If not, what would be needed to make it compatible ?

Thanks.

[kyleratti]

Hi @kedare, thanks for the question! Right now, this driver only supports the 5.7" display.

I ported the Python library very quickly and only had the 5.7" display available. I always intended to support the 7.3" display, however, when I looked into this a few weeks ago, it seemed like the 7.3" driver is actually very different from the 5.7" driver. I don't think it's possible to tweak the existing code. Instead, it'd essentially be another full port.

So, unfortunately, for now this is 5.7" only. That said, there is hope! I have plans for a new project in the near term that will use the 7.3" display and that means I will be porting the 7.3" driver! I also have plans to do some heavy refactors to improve the ergonomics of the API, as I had ported the whole thing in a week in order to deliver a Christmas present on time, and the API reflects that :).

Just so I can gauge the level of urgency and importance to you: can you give me an idea of what you're trying to use this for and how soon you were hoping to have it?

I would really love to avoid using Python for my project on it.

Boy, do I hear you on this one! It was a nightmare even getting their driver to work. That's what pushed me over the edge and made me port it.

[kedare]

Thanks for your response.

Nothing critical or urgent from my side, just a personal project to have a e-ink display at home.

From what I understood, the 7" works quite differently as for example it cannot do partial updates and the refresh delay is quite high (around 30s)

I started the project in Python for now because I don´t really have a choice (just generating the image and then running the code from the sdk appart to push it to the display)

[kyleratti]

Nothing critical or urgent from my side, just a personal project to have a e-ink display at home.

Got it - that's pretty much my planned use-case, too!

From what I understood, the 7" works quite differently as for example it cannot do partial updates and the refresh delay is quite high (around 30s)

For what it's worth, the 5.7" display works very similarly to this; the entire screen has to refresh, the refresh rate is about 35 seconds, and it's suggested not to refresh faster than every 2 minutes. If the app has to do initialization (e.g., on first run before anything can be pushed to the display), the first refresh is closer to 50 seconds. I expect the 7.3" will be the same if not slightly longer to refresh just due to size.

I started the project in Python for now because I don´t really have a choice (just generating the image and then running the code from the sdk appart to push it to the display)

This is definitely an option. I considered writing everything in .NET but just calling Python to push the final image out to the display, but in the end I didn't like how fragile that inherently was. Plus it was a fun challenge to reverse engineer and port this.

Let me know if you would still like a .NET port for the 7.3" display or if you're leaning more into pushing the image with Python; I can probably shift some of my hobby stuff around to prioritize this if you're interested, but I would guess 1-2 months before I could finish it.