Customer:
I’m successfully using three Inkplate boards in a home art project, able to connect to WiFi and load images from a webpage using the example code. I’m looking for a way to get Inkplate to show updated images remotely.
Currently I change the hosted image (the path and file name doesn’t change) and use the physical button to power on the Inkplate, which connects to WiFi and gets the latest image.
Is there a way to remotely power on and off an Inkplate? Alternatively, can I use one of the GPIO pins as a capacitive power button so I can relocate it, since the button on the side is not easy to reach in my wall mount solution?
Any advice on how to implement this would be appreciated.
Originally submitted via email support on 12 September 2024. Migrated to the forum for community visibility.
Soldered Support:
Remotely powering the device on and off isn’t possible in a simple sense. You could technically use an external device like a relay with an ESP32 which you could then control via WiFi, but that could quickly get too complicated.
What is most commonly done in these cases is putting Inkplate to sleep and waking it every x minutes/hours to periodically update the image automatically. The board has good low power features (one of the main features of ePaper) so on a single battery charge, periodically checking for updates (and only updating if there’s new content) it can work quite a long time. Check out the deep sleep example for this approach.
As far as the GPIO pin as a capacitive button: you can use one of ESP32’s native buttons which are also accessible on the PCB. Using GPIO expander buttons to wake would not work in this case. Check out the wake on button example sketch and try using IO39 towards the right (make sure to change it in the code also, compile and upload). Try with a small wire shorting that pin to ground when Inkplate goes to sleep. One of these approaches should work well.
Attachment omitted in migration: image.png