The Reddit users among you may already be aware of the Shower Thoughts subreddit. For those of you who aren’t, Shower Thoughts is where people go to post the random epiphanies they’ve had about life, the universe, and everything. For example:

YouTuber ACROBOTIC is a fan of the Shower Thoughts subreddit. So much so that they decided to program their Raspberry Pi to update an e-paper HAT with the subreddit’s top posts from the last hour.

For their build, they used a three-colour e-paper display, but you can use any e-paper add-on for Raspberry Pi to recreate the project. They also used Raspberry Pi 4, but again, this project will work with other models — even Raspberry Pi Zero W.

ACROBOTIC created an image to frame the Shower Thoughts posts, which they uploaded to their Raspberry Pi as a .bmp file. They altered prewritten code for using the e-paper display to display this frame image and the various posts.

Adding .json to the URL of the appropriate Shower Thoughts page allows access to the posts in JSON format. Then a request can be set up to pull the data from this URL.

ACROBOTIC goes into far more detail in their video, and it’s a great resource if you’re looking to try out working with JSON files or to learn how to pull data from Reddit.

Find more projects using e-paper displays for you to recreate in our handy guide.