Articles in the Hardware category

  1. IKEA $50 VINDSTYRKA vs. $290 Dylos Air Quality Monitor

    Sun 17 September 2023

    This is a brief article in which I compare the IKEA VINDSTYRKA $50 air quality monitor (PM2.5) with a $290 air quality monitor made by Dylos to see if it's any good.

    Context

    If you care about indoor air quality, you may already own a CO2 to determine if it's time to ventilate your space a bit1.

    But a CO2 monitor doesn't tell you anything about the amount and size of particulate matter in the air.

    Of particular interest are very fine particles, in the "PM2.5" category. Those particles are 2.5 micrometers or smaller in diameter can embed themselves deep inside the lungs and cause health issues.

    Both air quality monitoring devices are specifically measuring PM2.5 particulate matter, so that's what we will focus on in this test.

    DYLOS DC1100 PRO

    I bought a Dylos DC1100 Pro in 2014 as I was quite interesting in the topic of air quality at that time. As I had to import the device, I believe I had to pay around 400 Euros for it but it's now for sale in the US for around $290.

    Dylos DC1100 Pro click on the image for a picture of the back

    I specifically chose this model because it has a serial port, which allows me to log data and maybe spot some trends. I was thinking about using this data to control my air circulation system in my home, but I never got around to building this.

    This device (without serial port) is also explored in-depth by Matthias Wandel, who many of you probably know from his 1.7M subscribers Youtube channel. Tip: he shows the inside of the device.

    Note that this video is from 10 years ago and I find it remarkable that the Dylos 1100 Pro is still sold - seemingly unmodified - over the years.

    The IKEA VINDSTYRKA

    Recently, I discovered that IKEA is now selling the VINDSTYRKA air quality monitor with support for Zigbee. The product is intended to be used with IKEAs range of air purifiers, to better finetune the behaviour of those devices.

    vindstyrka

    The device measures PM2.5 particulate matter and also monitors temperature and humidity. All data is exposed over Zigbee. I've not tested this myself but I wonder how long it would last on a battery bank as it's USB powered.

    Due to the low price tag, I decided to compare this $50 device (€40) with my Dylos. I think it's quite an interesting device because the Zigbee support allows you to integrate the device in home automation and log data, if you have a need for that.

    Data logging setup

    De Dylos device is a bit of a pain, because the measurement values are in particulates per square foot, so I had to find a proper conversion formula, which I found in this paper (page 17). The formula is:

    PM2.5 Dylos DC1100 (μg/m3) = (particles > 0.5 μm minus particles > 2.5 μm)/250.
    

    A Raspberry Pi 3B+ is running a Python script that reads the data from the serial port, converts it to PM2.5 values using the previous mentioned formula and transmits it into an InfluxDB + Grafana server.

    To log the VINDSTYRKA data, I used a Sonoff Zigbee receiver on a Raspberry Pi 4b+. I installed zigbee2mqtt as a docker container, Mosquitto MQTT server and Telegraf+MQTT-client to submit the data into InfluxDB, which sounds more convoluted than it actually was.

    Test method

    I just let both devices run for a few days in close proximity to each other in my living room. I kept a balcony door open 24/7. I also created a bit of smoke at some point just to observe how the devices would respond and how much they would deviate from each other. Nothing too scientific, to be frank.

    Test result

    I've plotted the data from the Dylos and the Ikea device in the same graph and I think the results are quite straightforward. The peak in the middle was my 'smoke test'.

    Original grafana graph click on the image for a larger version

    Updated grafana graph click on the image for a larger version

    After a few days I noticed a clear deviation between the VINDSTYRKA and the Dylos DC1100 Pro at certain time intervals. I have no real explanation for this deviation and I can't tell which device shows 'correct' data.

    If I try to follow the AQI PM2.5 values for my city, the VINDSTYRKA seems to under report and the Dylos seems to over-report PM2.5 particulate matter.

    Evaluation

    Based on my test, I think the VINDSTYRKA is good enough, looking at how closely the measurements track the results of the Dylos.

    Update September 19th 2023 Based on the new graph data, it seems the Dylos and VINDSTYRKA are less in agreement over absolute PM2.5 values. I'm not sure what to make of it.

    As both devices still seem to agree on basic trend data, I would say that they still operate in the same ballpark.


    1. Maybe you are a home automation enthusiast and you've managed to automate this process. 

    Tagged as : Solar
  2. Recycle Your Old Laptop Display and Turn It Into a Monitor

    Sat 13 March 2021

    During a cleaning spree I decided that it was time to recycle two old laptops that were just collecting dust on a shelf for many years. Although I didn't have any purpose for them anymore, I realised that the displays were still perfectly fine.

    This is the display of my old 13" Intel-based MacBook.

    screen

    Somehow it felt wasteful to just throw the laptops out, I wondered if it would be possible to use these displays as a regular monitor?

    It turns out: yes this is possible and it is also quite simple. My blogpost covers the same topic, with a few more pictures1.

    There is a particular LCD driver board that can be found all over ebay and the well-known Chinese webshops.

    controller2

    These boards cost around $20 and come with most things you need to get the display operational.

    The board includes:

    1. A small controller print for the on-screen display (center)
    2. A high-voltage power supply for the backlight (left)
    3. The data cable to drive the actual display (right)
    4. Support for audio-passthrough + volume control (right corner)

    The board doesn't include:

    1. A 12-volt power supply
    2. Some kind of frame to make the display and board one easy to handle unit

    controller3

    The board supports HDMI, VGA and DVI for signal input so it should work with almost any computer.

    This particular board (M.NT68676.2) is used to power many different panel models. Although the board itself may be the same, it's important to order the board that is specifically tailored to the particular LCD panel you have. The panels seem easy to identify. This is the Macbook LCD panel type (LP133WX1 TL A1):

    model

    That TL/A1 part of the model is critical to finding the appropriate controller.

    I also have an old Dell Vostro screen that uses the exact same driver board, but the cables are different. Also, it may be the case that the boards are flashed with the appropriate firmware for the particular panel. So I would recommend not to gamble and get the driver board that exactly matches the model number.

    To make everything work, we first connect the high-voltage module to the backlight power cable...

    hv

    ...and we also connect the LCD driver cable:

    driver

    When I connected everything for the first time, the display didn't work at all. It turns out that the board shipped with a second, separate interface cable and I had to swap those cables to make the display work properly.

    Power supply

    According to the sales page, the board requires a 12-volt 2A adapter, but in practice, I could get away with a tiny, much weaker power supply.

    adapter

    I found an old adapter from a Wi-Fi access-point (long gone) which is rated for just 0.5A. It did power both the board and the screen perfectly. It worked with both the Macbook display as the Dell display so it doesn't seem to be a fluke.

    Although I didn't measure actual power consumption, we know that it can't be more than just 6 Watt because that's what the power adapter can handle.

    Laptop displays need to be power efficient and that may also make them interesting for low-power or battery-powered projects.

    We've only just begun

    The display works, but that was the easy part.

    display

    The hardest part of this proces (not pictured) was switching the on-screen-display from Chinese (which I don't master) to English. But there is more work ahead.

    At this point we end up with just a fragile LCD panel connected to a driver board through a bunch of wires. The whole setup is just an unpractical mess. There are at least two things left to do:

    1. Mount the driver board, OSD controller and high-voltage unit to the back of the LCD panel
    2. Make some kind of stand

    For the old Dell display, I used a bit of wood and hot glue to make a wooden scaffold on which I could mount the driver board with a few screws. It won't win any prizes for sure but it's just an example of what needs to be done make the display (more) manageable.

    amateur

    It still doesn't have a stand but that's for another day. I can imagine that if you own a 3D printer, you can make a nice case with a stand, although that will increase the cost of the project.

    Evaluation

    What I like most about this kind of project is the fact that for very little money, you can recycle a perfectly fine and usable display that will probably last for another five to ten years. The project takes very little effort and it is also not difficult to do.

    You can augment existing hobby projects with a screen and due to the relatively low power consumption, it may even be suitable for battery-powered projects.

    And with a bit of work you can make a nice (secondary) monitor out of them. Finally you have an excuse to dust off one of your unused Raspberry Pis that you had to have but didn't have any actual use for.

    The thrift-store is cheaper

    If your goal is just to get a cheap LCD display, it may be cheaper to go to the nearest thrift-store and buy some old second-hand display for $10. But that may have some drawbacks:

    • It will be much larger than the laptop screen
    • It is powered by 110/220 volt so less suitable for a battery-powered setup
    • overall power consumption will be higher

    So it all depends on your particular needs.

    Closing words

    If you also repurposed a laptop monitor for a project or just as a (secondary) screen, feel free to share your work in the comments.


    1. I posted the article on slashdigit to hacker news and it got quite an interest

    Tagged as : Hardware
  3. A 12.48 Inch (1304x984) Three-Color E-Paper Display by Waveshare

    Tue 22 December 2020

    Introduction


    Update September 2023: A small horizontal and large vertical row of pixels died. Demo of defective display here.


    I'm running a solar-powered blog and I wanted to add a low-power display to show the daily solar 'harvest'1 and maybe some additional information.

    So I decided to use an e-paper display. I wanted a display that would be readable from a distance, so bigger would be better. I therefore chose the Waveshare 12.48 inch e-paper display2.

    "e-paper display"

    an example based on data from the summer, generated with Graphite

    This particular display costs $179 excluding taxes and shipping at the time this article was written.

    Specifications

    Waveshare sells a two-color (black and white) and a three-color version (black, white, red). I bought the three-color version. The three-color version is the (B) model.

    Specifications:

    Screen size     :      12.48 inches
    Resolution      :      1304 x 984
    Colors          :      black, white, red
    Greyscale       :      2 levels
    Refresh rate    :      16 seconds
    Partial refresh :      Not supported
    Interfaces      :      Raspberry Pi, ESP32, STM32, Arduino
    

    The two-color variant of this display has a refresh rate of 8 seconds.

    This display is clearly quite slow. Furthermore, the lack of partial refresh support could make this display unsuitable for some applications. I was OK with this slow refresh rate.

    The image below demonstrates different fonts and sizes. I think DejaVuSansMono-Bold looks really well on the display, better than the font supplied by Waveshare.

    "e-paper display"

    The Interfaces

    The display includes a microcontroller that in turn can be driven through one of four interfaces:

    1. A Raspberry Pi (Worked)
    2. An ESP32 (Not tested)
    3. An Arduino (Didn't work)
    4. An STM32 (Not tested)

    I've tried the Arduino header with an Arduino Uno, but the supplied demo code didn't work. I did not investigate further why this was the case. It could be a problem with voltage regulation.

    "e-paper display"

    In the image above, the black plastic backplate is removed.

    Image quality

    These e-paper displays are mostly sold as product information displays for supermarkets and other businesses. However, the quality is good enough to display images. Especially the support for red can make an image stand out.

    Below is an example of an image that incorporates the third (red) color.

    "e-paper display"

    The display seems suitable to display art.

    "e-paper display"

    It looks quite good in real life (sorry for the glare).

    How the display shows three colors

    The display acts like it is actually two displays in one. A black and white display, and a red and white display.

    First, the black and white image is drawn. Next, the red and white image is put on top.

    Because the display has to draw two images in succession, it takes 16 seconds to refresh the screen. This explains why the black-and-white version of this screen does a refresh in eight seconds: it doesn't have to refresh the red color.

    Please note that the entire process of displaying content on the screen takes much longer.

    A demonstration:

    Displaying an image is cumbersome (On Raspberry Pi 3B+)

    At the time this article was written, I could not find any information or tools for this display3.

    Many Waveshare e-paper displays are popular and have a decent community support. However, it seems that this display is rather unknown.

    Therefore, it seems that there are no tools available to display an arbitrary image on this display. You can use the example Python code to display an image but you have to follow these steps:

    1. Create a black-and-white version of the image
    2. Create a red-and-white version of the image, that contains only data for the red parts of the image
    3. If the source image doesn't match the required resolution, you have to resize, crop and fill the image where appropriate.

    Both 'black' and 'red' images need to exactly match the resolution of the display (1304x984) or the library will abort with an error.

    As I found this proces tedious, I automated it.

    A new tool to make displaying an image easy

    I've used the python library as supplied by Waveshare and created a command-line tool (Github) on top of it to perform all the required steps as described in the previous section. I'm using Imagemagick for all the image processing.

    The script works like this:

    ./display -i <image file> [--rotate 90] [--fuzz 35] [--color yellow]
    

    The --fuzz and --color parameters may require some clarification.

    The color red is extracted from an image but it's not always perfect. By applying the --fuzz parameter (the argument is a percentage), it is possible to capture more of the red (or selected color) of an image.

    The --color option specifies which color should be 'converted' to red. By default this color is 'red' (obviously). The 'solar chart' (at the start of this article) is an example where a yellow line was converted to red.

    Very slow: it takes about 55 seconds to display an image using the Raspberry Pi 3B+. Half of that minute is spend converting the images to the appropriate format using Imagemagick.

    Informational: The Python program includes a modified version of the Waveshare Python library. This library has been altered to prevent double conversion of images, which significantly degrades image quality.

    Slow performance

    If you use the provided Python library (Python3 compatible) it takes about 30+ seconds to draw an image on the screen. (This excludes the image processing performed with the 'display' tool.)

    Further testing showed that the Python library converts and dithers the image before it is sent to the display. And it does so for both black and red. Dithering is performed by looping in Python over every of the 1.3 milion pixels.

    Each of these loops (for black and red) take about 10 seconds on the Raspberry Pi 3B+, which explains why it takes so long to update the display. Therefore, I think the combination of Python + the Raspberry Pi 3B+ is not ideal in this case.

    Evaluation

    I wanted to share my experience with this display to make other people aware of its existence. The tool I created should make it simple to get up and running and display an image.

    It clearly has some drawbacks but due to the size, resolution and third color, it seems to be unique and may therefore be interesting.

    Although I never tried the display with an ESP32, I think its an ideal for the purpose of a low-power picture frame.

    This article was discussed on Hacker News (briefly). This resulted in about 9000 unique visitors for this article.

    Appendix A - Remark on other displays

    Please note: Waveshare also sells a smaller 10.3 inch black-and-white e-paper display for a similar price with some significant benefits:

    Screen size     :      10.3 inches
    Resolution      :      1872 x 1404
    Colors          :      black and white
    Greyscale       :      16 levels
    Refresh rate    :      450 miliseconds
    Partial refresh :      Supported
    

    This particular display is smaller but has a higher resolution, supports 16 grayscale levels and updates in half a second. This display may better suit your particular needs. For example, I believe that this display may have been used in this project, a solar-powered digital photo frame.

    Appendix B - How to make the display work on a Raspberry Pi

    This information is straight from the Waveshare site but I include it for completeness and ease of use.

    PART I: Enable the SPI interface with raspi-config

    1. sudo raspi-config
    2. select Interfacing Options
    3. Select SPI
    4. Select Yes
    5. Reboot the Raspberry Pi

    PART II: Install the required libraries

    Install BCM283

    Website

    wget http://www.airspayce.com/mikem/bcm2835/bcm2835-1.60.tar.gz
    tar zxvf bcm2835-1.60.tar.gz 
    cd bcm2835-1.60/
    sudo ./configure
    sudo make
    sudo make check
    sudo make install
    

    Install wiringPi

    website

    sudo apt-get install wiringpi
    cd /tmp
    wget https://project-downloads.drogon.net/wiringpi-latest.deb
    sudo dpkg -i wiringpi-latest.deb
    gpio -v
    

    Caution: The library seems to be deprecated. The Raspberry Pi 4 is supported but future versions of the Raspberry Pi may not.

    The wiringPi library is used as part of a compiled library called "DEV_Config.so" as found in the ./lib directory.

    @raspberrypi:~/epaper_display $ ldd lib/DEV_Config.so 
        linux-vdso.so.1 (0x7ee0d000)
        /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libarmmem-${PLATFORM}.so => /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libarmmem-v7l.so (0x76f1e000)
        libwiringPi.so => /usr/lib/libwiringPi.so (0x76f00000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libm.so.6 (0x76e7e000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libc.so.6 (0x76d30000)
        libpthread.so.0 => /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libpthread.so.0 (0x76d06000)
        librt.so.1 => /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/librt.so.1 (0x76cef000)
        libcrypt.so.1 => /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libcrypt.so.1 (0x76caf000)
        /lib/ld-linux-armhf.so.3 (0x76f46000)
    

    Install Python3 and required libraries

    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install python3-pip
    sudo apt-get install python3-pil
    sudo pip3 install RPi.GPIO
    sudo pip3 install spidev
    

    Apendix C - E-paper hacking

    I see myself as a consumer and I don't have any desire to hack the display for lower refresh-rates or partial refresh support, with the risk of damaging the display in the process.

    However one resource about this topic I find very informative is a video from the Youtube Channel "Applied Science" (By Ben Krasnow), called "E-paper hacking: fastest possible refresh rate".

    Apendix D - Available libraries

    Example code for all supported platforms can be found in this github location.

    I also found this github repository that may support this display. This code (also) didn't work for me on my Arduino uno. This could be due to a voltage mismatch, but I'm not willing to solder and potentially destroy the display.

    Apendix E - Links to other e-paper projects

    Very large and expensive display (Medium paywall)

    E-paper calendar

    Solar-powered digital photo frame


    1. During fall and winter, there is almost no power generation due to the very sub-optimal location of my balcony. 

    2. You can go larger but at a cost

    3. My google skills may be at fault but that point is now moot. 

    Tagged as : Hardware

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