E Ink Album Art Display for Raspberry Pi
Turn your RaspPi audio source, plus Inky Expression 7-color E Ink display, into a beautiful album art display for your hifi system.
Display your own images while the stereo is not being used.
- Shairport Sync (Airplay) support
- MPD (Music Player Daemon) support
- Screen Saver module
- Gradient borders when the album art does not fill the display
- Centered on Moode Audio but not dependent on it
- Modular implementation, easy to add support for any other audio renderer that provides album art metadata
- Minimal CPU/power utilization due to event-driven design
- Raspberry Pi
- Inky Expression 7-color E Ink display
- BYO DAC, amp and speakers, of course
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Install Moode Audio on your boot disk and configure to your liking
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Run the setup script:
sudo curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lansing/blackdog/refs/heads/master/setup.sh | sudo bash
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Make sure your Inky Expression is plugged in to your GPIO pins
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Play some tunes and enjoy the album art
- Display Server provides an HTTP endpoint. Images posted here will be processed (which includes adding a gradient border/background if requested) and rendered on the E Ink display
- Source modules
- Shairport Sync source: subscribes to an MQTT topic for changes in album art metadata
- MPD source: uses the native MPD client to listen for changes in the current track filename, fetches album art from an HTTP endpoint (such as one provided by Moode Audio)
- Screen Saver source: rotates through images in a directory.
These all run as separate processes and systemd services.
- Mosquitto MQTT broker is installed
- Shairport is configured to publish metadata updates to an MQTT topic
- Some required RaspPi firmware config changes are made, if necessary, to support the Inky display
- The BlackDog components are installed as systemd services, and started
Please get in touch if you're using this!