Palomino: A high definition ePaper 'Now Playing' viewer For Volumio

Code for an easy-on-the-eye ePaper display that talks to a bit-perfect music player. All of the musical heavy lifting is done by Volumio. The code sets up a socket connection, listens for changes and updates the display when needed.

Video

The viewer in the video is running a veeb epaper display, which is a Raspberry Pi Zero WH and a High Definition E-Paper Display in a custom frame.

Hardware

Palomino Track Viewer:

• Raspberry Pi Zero WH
• E Paper Display (a Waveshare 6" HD screen)

For any of this to work, you'll have to be using a Volumio Server.

Volumio server: Hardware for this is covered in detail elsewhere, but the tl;dr is

• Raspberry Pi 4
• Speakers with built in DAC (eg KEF LS50) or DAC (Hifiberry, IQAudio etc) and Sound System

Prerequisites

• A Working Volumio server on your LAN
• A Pi Zero running Raspbian, with a Waveshare 6inch HD ePaper attached
• The Python module for IT8951 installed on the Pi Zero

Installation

All of this takes place on the Pi-Zero - not on the volumio server .

From your home directory, clone the repository

git clone git@github.com:llvllch/palomino.git
cd palomino

then install the required modules using python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt then move to the directory and copy the example config file and tailor to your needs:

cp config_example.yaml config.yaml

You can then edit config.yaml file to set the name of your server. Once that's done, you can run the code using the command:

python3 palomino.py

After a few seconds, the screen will show the track currently playing on you Volumio server.

Add Autostart

Once you've got a working instance of the code, you will probably want it to start automatically every time you power up. You can use systemd to start the code as a service on boot.

cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/systemd/system/palomino.service
[Unit]
Description=palomino
After=network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 -u /home/pi/palomino/palomino.py
WorkingDirectory=/home/pi/palomino/
StandardOutput=inherit
StandardError=inherit
Restart=always
User=pi

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF

Now, simply enable the service you just made and reboot...

sudo systemctl enable palomino.service
sudo systemctl start palomino.service

sudo reboot

Licence

GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3.0