Inkplate 6 scheduling, battery, and stocks ticker feasibility

TECHNICAL SUPPORT Inkplate
1

Customer:

I’m considering Inkplate 6 and have several questions:

  1. Can this support crontab/cronjob/scheduling?
  2. Is there any built-in battery? If I need to purchase an additional battery, how long can it roughly last? My use case is to create a stocks ticker that tracks stock numbers refreshed every minute or so—is this feasible?
  3. I’d like to base it on something like: GitHub - pstadler/ticker.sh: Real-time stock tickers from the command-line. · GitHub

Originally submitted via email support on 14 December 2020. Migrated to the forum for community visibility.

2

Soldered Support:

  1. You can do basically anything because it’s in C. Using Timers, you can make scheduling.
  2. There’s no built-in battery. Any lithium ion 3.7V battery is okay. Please do get one locally as it is hard to ship those.
  3. Not a problem. There’s a cryptocurrency tracker already in the library, so you can base it on that one: https://github.com/e-radionicacom/Inkplate-Arduino-library/tree/master/examples/Projects/Crypto_tracker_example

If you write this code, feel free to submit a PR to the repo so we will add it to the official library.

3

Customer:

  1. I’m not familiar with C, but I can learn. When you said Timers, is it C code? Does the script keep on running? Or is it a similar concept to cronjob?
  2. So it comes with the plug basically, right? Any data on how long a battery lasts—for example, 1000 mAh?
4

Soldered Support:

It’s quite similar to cronjob, but even simpler. Check here for details: Arduino Timer Tutorial - Using Arduino Timers with Examples.

There’s detailed documentation for Inkplate here: inkplate.readthedocs.io

As for the battery, yes, you just plug it in. Battery duration depends heavily on how you use the device. An optimised device that spends time between screen refreshes in sleep and refreshes every 15 minutes or so can last months.