Open-sourced E-ink photo frame project
I open-sourced an e-ink photo frame project I worked on: Not-So-Sticky-Pix.
We originally planned to launch it on Kickstarter, but eventually decided not to pursue it as a product, so I figured it would be better to release everything publicly instead.
The hardware was designed with mass production in mind rather than being maker-friendly, so building a one-off is fairly expensive. It uses an nRF54L15, and getting 5 assembled PCBs shipped to the U.S. can cost around $300. The 3D-printed enclosure is roughly $20, and the color e-ink display is around $60.
Even though we didn't launch it, I learned a ton from the project—PCB design, low-power embedded development, BLE, e-ink displays, enclosure design, manufacturing, and taking a hardware product from an idea toward production.
The original idea was to let people send photos to friends' frames through an app. We didn't get as far as building the full social/cloud side, so the current app mainly lets you:
- Send/update an image on the color e-ink display
- Edit and preview an image to see roughly how it will look on the display
The app UI is definitely prototype-quality, but it works.
The enclosure is also mostly complete. One known issue is that the snap clips don't properly snap together yet, and print results may vary depending on the material/settings you use.
Everything is here:
https://github.com/StickyPix/Not-So-Sticky-Pix
If you're into embedded systems, e-ink, BLE, or hardware product development, feel free to poke around.
Star it if you find it interesting, and if you have any questions about the hardware, firmware, app, manufacturing process, or why we decided not to launch it, feel free to ask.
