Waveshare 10.3" display

[mariusandra]

Trying to get the 10.3" display (it8951) working. Not there yet.

[harald79]

Hi there,
just wanted to check in if there’s been any progress on supporting this display.
It would be really awesome to finally get it working. At the moment, I’m using it with PaperPi, but I’d love to switch over as soon as support is available.

Thanks a lot for all your work on this project!

[mariusandra]

Hey @harald79 , this took a small backseat while I was working on the e-ink spectra build guide video. Now that that's done, I'm going to pick it up again, as I also want to get the display to work. However I'm away on holiday for another week, so it'll take a little bit longer... :)

[mariusandra]

I finally had time to play with this, and got it working:

However... it's damn slow. I'm using the lgpio driver (and a Pi5), and it takes about one minute to render the screen:

render:driver device="waveshare.EPD_10in3" ms=56324.744

The time seems to be spent uploading the image over the SPI bus from the raspberry to the control board. It then takes less than a second to actually change the image on the screen.

@harald79 what kind of performance are you currently experiencing with this board and PaperPI?

I could definitely look into supporting partial refreshes, but still 60sec seems a lot. Perhaps switching lgpio to something else will help? I'm not sure.

I still need to add the VCOM variable into settings somewhere, and I'll then merge the PR.

[harald79]

Thanks for your work! I’ll give it a try on my Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W today.
Regarding your question: in Paperpi there’s the Slideshow plugin, where I can set a refresh_rate of e.g. 5 seconds – and it’s actually respected.

The plugin also includes some example images, for instance elephant.jpg, which is located under:
/usr/local/paperpi/plugins/slideshow/fallback_images/

These Pictures have a resolution of 1756×1305 pixels at 96 DPI