After a few weeks of off-and-on tinkering, the Pi Zero W e-ink dashboard is genuinely running. Page rotation across weather, Docker stats, network status, and cloud service health — all on a 5.83” Waveshare display sitting on my desk quietly doing its thing.
What it shows
Four rotating pages, each on a timed cycle:
- Weather — current conditions and a 3-day forecast pulled from Open-Meteo (free, no API key needed)
- Docker stats — container count, which ones are running vs stopped, swarm node status
- Network — ping latency to a few key hosts, WAN IP, uptime
- Cloud health — status of a handful of services I actually care about (Cloudflare, GitHub, AWS)
There’s also an alert override — if any service is down, that page jumps to the front of the rotation.
The ghost bug
The thing that took longest wasn’t writing the code. It was figuring out why certain page transitions left artifacts — ghost images from the previous page bleeding through.
Turns out: if you do partial updates back-to-back without a full refresh in between, the e-ink display accumulates these ghosts. The fix was a single call to display.clear() with a full refresh before each page render.
One line. Weeks of debugging.
Stack
- Raspberry Pi Zero W
- Waveshare 5.83” e-Paper HAT (black/white)
- Python with the Waveshare library
- systemd service for auto-start and page rotation
- Runs off a USB power bank — completely wireless
The whole thing idles at basically zero CPU and lasts forever on the power bank. It’s one of those projects that’s deeply satisfying once it works because it just sits there and quietly does its job.
Code is on GitHub if you want to poke at it.