Displaying a Website on E-Ink using an ESP32 dev board

[sculblaca]

Hello everybody!

I am currently working on a project for university. Part of it is displaying a website (one single day of a calendar website to be specific) on a 7.5inch e-ink display which is powered by an ESP32 dev board. Connecting the ESP32 and the e-ink display is a Waveshare E-Paper HAT.

The only solution I found was displaying a .png leaving me with the problem of converting an HTML file into a .png.

I'd appreciate detailed help (including basics) because I'm pretty new on this side of coding.

Best regards

[loboris]

Have you tried to search the web?
The first result links to the project which may help you.

[ESP_Sprite]

Note that taking a website and converting it to a bitmap (so you can display it on a screen, like your E-paper display) is all but trivial: to do it right you need to parse the html and css, handle fonts, decode images etc. (To get an indication: load up a website in a webbrowser and see how much memory that webbrowser takes up in your task manager. I'm pretty sure it won't fit in the ESP32 memory.) Unless you're fine with showing only very basic representations of websites (text-only, for instance) you're probably forced to do the actual conversion somewhere else. I've fixed this in the past by running PhantomJS (now abandoned; you may want to look for a modern equivalent instead) on a server to do the actual conversion into a bitmap there instead.

[sculblaca]

Thanks for your insights ESP_Sprite! I haven't really thought about the memory usage so that explains why I couldn't find anything on the web. Letting the server do the conversion seems to be the way to go, so I guess I'll take at look at that.

Thanks again for your quick replies.
Until next time