inkBoarddesigner 0.3.0

inkBoard designer bridges the gaps between designing an inkBoard dashboard and deploying it to a platform, without being tied down by the platform's limitations.

inkBoard Designer is meant to help designing inkBoard dashboards. While working on the software, it could be rather cumbersome trying to test code or dashboards on the platform itself. The designer provides an emulator, so it allows using the same yaml config as you'd use on device within it (as opposed to when you'd run it on the desktop platform). The interface is also meant to aid some steps in the design/install process.

For example, to keep the inkBoard package itself at a minimum, the platforms and integrations will be distributed along with the designer. However, it allows for creating packages of the running configuration, which can easily be installed in an inkBoard installation using inkBoard install.

Installation

pip install inkBoarddesigner

Usage

The command to run the designer is included in inkBoard itself, as well as some other hooks into it. It can be started by running inkBoard designer. Optionally, provide a configuration file to run, but that is not required. They can also be opened from the UI.

While I work on the documentation, the UI will likely be one of the last things to be written. For the moment, each widget has tooltips attached which should hopefully explain what they do adequately.

Getting Started

Currently, two examples are included in the example folder. They are a good way to get started, and comments are included in the files to help explain what certain lines do. If you want to download just the example, you can do so via i.e. here: https://downgit.github.io/#/home

In the examples/custom/integrations folder, the dummy_integration is also included. This is a template/explanatory integration, with comments to somewhat explain what functions are required, what stuff does, etc. It can be included by using the dummy_integration entry in your config. Aside from that, the custom folder also includes examples for custom functions and custom elements, which are used by the example configurations as well.

For the Home Assistant example, you should fill out the ha_substitutions.yaml file. It currently all references to secrets.yaml (via the !secret anchor), but they can also be put in the file directly. To run the integration, you should run inkBoard install integration homeassistant_client first, which takes care of downloading the appropriate requirements (the websockets and requests packages.)

Running the examples can be done by selecting the yaml file from the designer ui, or running inkBoard designer configuration.yaml from the examples folder.

Acknowledgements

This project has been a labour of love (and sometimes hate), and I could not have done this without these projects:

• The ESPHome project, which is where the idea for an E-Ink based dashboard was born for me.
• The Home Assistant project, as it got me started with this obsession, and has inspired multiple aspects of the architecture.
• The original PythonScreenStackManager by Mavireck, as it is the basis inkBoard was build on. Aside from providing the means to print stuff onto Kobo screens, it also provided the idea for an emulator
• FBInk and adjacent kobo packages by NileJule, for the kobostuff package, FBInk, and probably a lot more.
• The https://www.mobileread.com community as a whole, as they provided a whole lot of resources.