ePiPod
By Ben Everard. Posted
The more things change, the more they stay the same, as the French say. We’ve seen the return of vinyl as an audiophile way of consuming music; now it looks like digital files are making a comeback over streaming services. At least, they are in one small corner of the internet. Inspired by maker Bram Rausch’s PiPod, the ePiPod by drhatch takes a homegrown iPod-like music player, based on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, and adds an e-paper screen, rather than the PiPod’s 2.2-inch TFT screen.
The screen drhatch chose is a $6.99 display from Waveshare; the maker had to change the power supply from the original PiPod using Waveshare’s reference design; the software also had to change, to incorporate the Waveshare driver library and the Pillow Python library. Apart from the lack of screen glare, e-paper has the advantage of lower power use than the original build.
There’s no Apple-style scroll-wheel; instead, the ePiPod features five front-panel buttons for navigation and two side buttons for volume control. There’s also an on-off switch. Unlike a streaming service, the ePiPod will work when there’s no internet connection. It won’t play ads, and it lets the user play albums from start to finish. Groundbreaking!
