His GitHub says this:
"This might sound like a convoluted way to generate the calendar, but I'm doing so mainly because (i) it's easier to
format the calendar exactly the way I want it using HTML/CSS, and (ii) I can better delink the generation of the
calendar and refreshing of the eInk display. In the future, I might choose to generate the calendar on a separate
RPi device, while using a ESP32 or PiZero purely to just retrieve the image from a file host and update the screen."
Its easy to design something nice looking in html and css and compute is cheap. Seems like a fine solution to me. Maybe even better since you can push the image generation somewhere else and just have the RPI update the screen with an image which would save lots of power.
I've tried making nice interfaces with GUI toolkits and its a nightmare.
He has a valid point, generating the image on a separate device (heck, you could do that on AWS Lambda for free) and only grabbing the resulting image could vastly improve battery life. Then you could also switch from a power hungry Pi to a simpler choice like an ESP32.
Cause EInk display code works nice to just ship it an image type file. So, it's gotta be rasterized before, using Chromium makes that super easy - rather than hand crafting PNG.
I personally make SVG then rasterize but this isn't that terrible.
People gluing together lots of stuff to making something barely-working and massively inefficient is not a new phenomenon. Unfortunately, all the "maker movement" seems to have done is encourage it more. Careful design, knowledge and learning is being discouraged in favour of superficial understanding, copy-pasting, tweaking-until-it-works. They don't want to spend the time to learn the basics. I was recently saddened to see someone who had published code for a tiny project in Asm being asked if there could be "an Arduino version".
> Careful design, knowledge and learning is being discouraged in favour of superficial understanding, copy-pasting, tweaking-until-it-works.
This is like poo-pooing amatuer woodworking and saying “people should really become an apprentice first” - no one who has the education to do careful engineering is being discouraged, the field of hardware and software is now within reach of people who just wouldn’t take on any of these projects 10 years ago.
no one who has the education to do careful engineering is being discouraged
They are, because they think this stuff is just as good --- and it clogs the search results for those who do want to dig deeper. I often have to add "-Arduino -Maker" and a bunch of other filters to my search results to find the actually useful stuff.
This stuff IS good! It inspires people to task themselves with projects they don’t yet know how to do, and blog about what error codes they received and what they did to fix it.
Besides, how can you look down on them when you’re googling for answers instead of, you know, RTFM / getting your engineering degree?
and blog about what error codes they received and what they did to fix it
That is often more than useless to everyone not exactly in that one person's situation.
Besides, how can you look down on them when you’re googling for answers instead of, you know, RTFM / getting your engineering degree?
When trying to find TFM is itself a problem... I'm definitely not one to want to be "censoring misinformation" unlike a lot of others, but the blind leading the blind is certainly happening a lot and it doesn't help anyone.
