It's never as cheap as you think is it! I think fortunately I have most of the other bits lying around. Was planning on putting it in a wooden frame with a matte.
Can't really complain cause there's nothing better right now.
Compared to the previous gen e-ink (7-color ACeP), the contrast and the colors are so much better. I also have a bunch of 3-color (black/white/red) panels - video and more pictures on https://frameos.net/ ) - and the contrast is similar, but the colors are obviously limited.
The math didn't add up for us (I work at PostHog). At the rate we were scaling, we would have needed an entire call center's worth of highly trained Kubernetes support engineers to debug everyone's "my pods just died" / "Kafka just stopped" / "what is Zookeeper" problems.
This stack isn't straightforward to manage, and we couldn't crack the code of doing it at scale for other people without even having access to their systems. There was no malicious intent.
I believe the OP here is not playing 1999s music formats on a TV, but referring to MK4 and similar _video_ formats that a portable music player definitely can't play.
I believe in such places the cost of service and maintenance is many multiples the cost of the initial installation. A $20 "720p hdmi stick" from aliexpress vs a $300 mac mini is a no brainer. 100 mac minis will work reliably and predictably for years to come, whereas 100 random $20-$50 sticks sounds like something that needs constant supervision and maintenance.
That said, a RPi might be enough, depends on the software. That's why FrameOS has HDMI support, to work for such cases. It's still pretty far from being a turnkey solution today, but we could easily get there with some focus at the right time.
I apologize for the confusion, but you do not need to run FrameOS at all. You can just go about your merry day, and either just not use FrameOS, not post this comment, or, if you prefer, not read any of the comments addressing this question before posting yours.
On a serious note, yes, it's planned. The ESP is a very limited chip. If you want to display a BMP from a HTTP source, or a quick calendar, it's great. Try doing HTTPS, image downscaling or any serious processing though. Forget about things like browser screenshots, which you can't even do on 32bit linux anymore. Forget the 60fps mode over HDMI we can now do.
I'll try to get it working regardless, but it's but not a personal priority today over the other items in the todo list. You're free to lend a helping hand of course.
Re-reading, my tone in the first sentence sounds rather hostile. I apologise for that. I have no ill intent, the joke was likely funnier in my head.
FrameOS is also targeting 60+FPS LCD and other screens, which will be hard for ESP to run. Thus it's for the raspberry. I'd love to scale it down though, and deliberately chose Nim so that it would at least be theoretically possible.
Absolutely! Just hook up your display with a HDMI port to a raspberry, and you're good to go.
If you're fine with just displaying an image from an URL, it'll work today. If you want nicer slideshows or rotating images, you'd have to write some code to make it work, but it's all possible today.
A nicer interface tailored specifically for shop windows slideshows is something that could come at a later date.
I have gotten the new Nim-based FrameOS working with two different Waveshare displays. I have two other ones waiting to be tested. Check this folder [1] for the currently enabled drivers.
One of the next items on my todo list [2] is to add back support for all the different waveshare drivers out there. They all follow a similar pattern, so I should be able to generate "best guess" drivers for most of them.
I was quite shocked at the amount of tiny and large display options out there. I might even make a YouTube video titled "Home dashboards have gotten cheap and easy" with everything I've learned so far.
Take a $15 Pi Zero W 2, and a screen costing anywhere between $50 to $200. 3d-print a case around them both, and for a third of the price of a new iPad, you'll have a simple and secure single function screen in your house...
I just went through the process and made this for myself: https://www.printables.com/model/1189455-waveshare-133e-6-co...
The total price was around $420. This includes shipping, taxes (to Belgium), a pi zero w2, a sd card, and printing a case.