Auto epaper art

More images in images/

This is a self-contained image generation picture frame showing mostly on-topic news headlines and probably only tangentially related images.

The project runs Stable Diffusion on a raspberry pi, showing a image about a semi-random headline every 5 hours. It's a self-contained image generation picture frame showing mostly on-topic news headlines and probably only tangentially related images.

It could be a lot faster with less iteration but I like images that are time-wise more "expensive". A new image every 5 hours means that there's a new image in the morning, around lunch, around dinner and during the evening.

The generated images aren't saved, it's a physical piece and I like that you have to be there to see it. If you don't want this, remove rm arts/* from loop.sh.

It's fun to guess what the neural nets might have latched on to; Wednesday the day or Wednesday the character? The image generation isn't very good, adding it's own interesting twist.

It's a nice way to interact with the news.

Generation sources

Headlines are sourced from

• CNN
• BBC World
• DutchNews
• 9gag
• The nottheonion subreddit
• The gaming subreddit
• The onion
• Hackaday

The sources are chosen to be a nice mix of actual news and random funny bits. They're combined with some random prefixes and suffixes to hopefully make the images interesting.

See run.sh for sources and how to add your own.

Hardware

• IKEA picture frame
• Raspberry pi zero 2 w
• Inky Impression 7.3" (7 colour ePaper/E Ink HAT) https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/inky-impression-7-3

Keep the thermals in mind, the rpi zero is kept busy and pulls a couple of watts. It needs some (passive) airflow, don't put it into the enclosure without any additional cooling. I put it on the outside and that seems to be working fine.

Installation

Clone this repo

Clone the repo into ~/epaper-slow-generative-art, or update the location in the user cronjob if you don't.

Install stable diffusion that works with low amounts of RAM

• Follow the OnxxStream installation instructions, OnxxStream will end up in <this dir>/OnxxStream, XNNPACK will end up in <this dir>/XNNPACK. https://github.com/vitoplantamura/OnnxStream compile OnxxStream with -DMAX_SPEED=ON, or reduce steps from 28 to 10 in run.sh
• Put the weights from https://github.com/vitoplantamura/OnnxStream/releases in <this dir>/weights
• install required python packages with pip install -r

Increase swap

• sudo dphys-swapfile swapoff
• sudo vim /etc/dphys-swapfile, set CONF_SWAPSIZE=1024
• re-init swap with sudo dphys-swapfile setup
• turn the swap on again with sudo dphys-swapfile swapon

Install root cronjob

55 5 * * * reboot

Install user cronjobs

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/local/games:/usr/games

0 6,11,16,21 * * * cd epaper-slow-generative-art && /usr/bin/flock -w 0 ./loop-once.sh ./loop-once.sh >> /tmp/generate.log 2>&1

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