Spotipi E-Ink

Table of Content

Spotipi E-Ink

Overview

This project displays album artwork and song info on a 4", 5.7" or 7,3" e-ink display from the Spotify web api.
You can also control Spotify via the 4 Buttons on the Pimoroni Display.
The original concecpt came from Ryan Ward and his video: Youtube Video
This version is updated to account for the latest OS changes, virtual environments, and adds button controlls.

Button functions:

Button A - next track
Button B - previous track
Button C - play/pause
Button D - toggle repeat order: track, context(playlist), off

I recommend a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 with GPIO pins, which has the necessary power and is small enough to make a sleek final product.

The display refresh time is ~30 seconds.

Getting Started

Create a new application within the Spotify developer dashboard
Edit the settings of the application within the dashboard.
- Set the redirect uri to local url http://localhost/redirect
For the the Rapsberry PI Zero 2 use the "Raspberry PI OS Lite (64-bit)"
Download the install script

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Gabbajoe/spotipi-eink/main/setup.sh
chmod +x setup.sh

Install the software:

bash setup.sh

After the spotipi-eink is installed you will have 2 new systemd services:

spotipi-eink-display.service
spotipi-eink-buttons.service (only for Pimoroni displays)

This services run as the user with you used to execute setup.sh.

You control the services via systemctl start, stop, status (services-name). Example get the status of spotipi-eink-display.service:

spotipi@spotipi:~ $ sudo systemctl status spotipi-eink-display.service
● spotipi-eink-display.service - Spotipi eInk Display service
     Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/spotipi-eink-display.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
    Drop-In: /etc/systemd/system/spotipi-eink-display.service.d
             └─spotipi-eink-display_env.conf
     Active: active (running) since Tue 2023-10-31 09:30:05 CET; 27min ago
   Main PID: 4108 (python3)
      Tasks: 1 (limit: 383)
        CPU: 5min 13.455s
     CGroup: /system.slice/spotipi-eink-display.service
             └─4108 /home/spotipi/spotipi-eink/spotipienv/bin/python3 /home/spotipi/spotipi-eink/python/spotipiEinkDisplay.py

Oct 31 09:30:05 spotipi systemd[1]: Started spotipi-eink-display.service - Spotipi eInk Display service.
Oct 31 09:30:06 spotipi spotipi-eink-display[4108]: Spotipi eInk Display - Service instance created
Oct 31 09:30:07 spotipi spotipi-eink-display[4108]: Spotipi eInk Display - Loading Pimoroni inky lib
Oct 31 09:30:07 spotipi spotipi-eink-display[4108]: Spotipi eInk Display - Service started

Configuration

In the file spotipi/config/eink_options.ini you can modify:

the displayed title and artist text size
the direction of how the title or artist text line break will be done, top-down or bottom-up
the offset from display borders
disable the small album cover
the size of the small album cover
the font that will be used

Example config:

[DEFAULT]
width = 640
height = 400
album_cover_small_px = 200
; possible values are inky or waveshare4
model = inky
; disable smaller album cover set to False
; if disabled top offset is still calculated like as the following:
; offset_px_top + album_cover_small_px
album_cover_small = True
; cleans the display every 20 picture
; this takes ~60 seconds
display_refresh_counter = 20
username = theRockJohnson
token_file = /home/spotipi/spotipi-eink/config/.cache
spotipy_log = /home/spotipi/spotipi-eink/log/spotipy.log
no_song_cover = /home/spotipi/spotipi-eink/resources/default.jpg
font_path = /home/spotipi/spotipi-eink/resources/CircularStd-Bold.otf
font_size_title = 45
font_size_artist = 35
offset_px_left = 20
offset_px_right = 20
offset_px_top = 0
offset_px_bottom = 20
offset_text_px_shadow = 4
; text_direction possible values: top-down or bottom-up
text_direction = bottom-up
; possible modes are fit or repeat
background_mode = fit

Supported Hardware

Software

Raspberry Pi Imager

With the latest Raspberry PI OS Bookworm /var/log/syslog is no longer an option for logs. Instead, you have to use journalctl. To view the spotipi-eink-display.service and spotipi-eink-buttons.service logs use the following command:

# see all time logs
journalctl -u spotipi-eink-display.service -u spotipi-eink-buttons.service

# see only today logs
journalctl -u spotipi-eink-display.service -u spotipi-eink-buttons.service --since today

Spotipi-eink creates its own Python environment because since Raspberry PI OS Bookworm insists on protected environments for Python See:

This should be unnecessary, but if you wish to manually execute the Python script you can load into the Virtual Python environment with the following commands. When in the Virtual Python environment, Terminal will display (spotipienv):

cd ~
. spotipi/spotipi-eink/spotipienv/bin/activate

Additionally you need to export the following 3 environment variables on you shell that the spotipy library is working. You can fnd the values for them in then file /etc/systemd/system/spotipi-eink-display.service.d/spotipi-eink-display_env.conf

export SPOTIPY_CLIENT_ID=''
export SPOTIPY_CLIENT_SECRET=''
export SPOTIPY_REDIRECT_URI=''

To leave the Virtual Python environment just type: deactivate

3D printing

Free cases

None free cases from Pimoroni

Show case

Example picture of my 4" display in the Pimoroni Desktop case:

Know issue

Just recently(2024/08/16) the GPIO Kernel Module in Raspberry PI OS changed.

You may notice with an OS update that your Pimironi display stoped working or even find the error message

Woah there, some pins we need are in use!
     Chip Select: (line 8, GPIO8) currently claimed by spi0 CS0

Here you need to add dtoverlay=spi0-0cs to the end of your /boot/firmware/config.txt example:

sudo vi /boot/firmware/config.txt

put it in the [all] section at the end of the file a line like this:

[all]
dtoverlay=spi0-0cs

and reboot the pi. Thank you @conrat4567 for bringing that to my attention