The vibrant community and commercial ecosystem around Raspberry Pi helps people to bring their ideas to life. Here, student Jaeheon Shim uses a Raspberry Pi Pico W–powered e-ink display from one of our Approved Resellers to help him focus and stay on track with the demands of a packed timetable.

If you’ve got a busy schedule, then it’s all too easy to become overwhelmed. Without a good system in place, you’ll find deadlines slip, appointments are missed, and you’re constantly playing catch-up. It’s why there are so many calendar and task management apps on the market and, crucially, why Jaeheon Shim decided to take his scheduling to another level.

“As a student, staying organised is crucial for keeping up with the demands of college life,” he says. “I found myself relying on productivity apps like Google Calendar, Todoist, and Notion, but they weren’t enough. Instead, I wanted my calendar to be physically present at my workspace, updating in real time to accommodate last-minute events. I also wanted it to be aesthetically pleasing — something that would perfectly complement my workspace while being as informative as possible.”

Task master

To that end, Jaeheon devised the Inky Dashboard — effectively an e-ink display connected to a Raspberry Pi Pico W microcontroller running a bespoke UI. “I think e-ink displays are awesome. There’s just something about their crisp, paper-like quality that makes them so uniquely satisfying to look at,” he says. “I also wanted something that could sit on my desk without being a distraction; something that I could occasionally glance at but was otherwise running quietly in the background.”

At its core, Jaeheon wanted a week-by-week calendar, where daily events would be laid out in a chronological column. “That way, I could visualise my week ‘at a glance’ and mentally prepare for the upcoming days of the week,” he says, deciding to integrate his data from iCal. 

But when he later opted to integrate tasks from the Todoist app as well, to help him stay on top of his assignments and projects, he knew that he needed to compromise. “I had to shrink the calendar to only two days wide to make space for the to-do list, but in my experience, being able to see today and tomorrow is enough for almost all purposes,” he adds. 

Quick FACTS

• The dashboard remains in a low-power state
• It’s woken up by Raspberry Pi Pico’s on-board real-time clock
• Data is drawn from a custom server
• It will update every 30 minutes or so
• The project is entirely open source

To-do list

Working with a Raspberry Pi Pico W presented a learning curve for Jaeheon. “I’d never seriously worked with embedded programming before,” he says. It took numerous attempts to create the UI he wanted, having tried libraries provided by Pimoroni and developing his own UI library. “Ultimately, I ended up settling on Light and Versatile Graphics Library (LVGL), and it took about a week to figure out how to port LVGL to Pico and Pimoroni’s Inky Frame.”

In the process, he figured out how to lay out overlapping events — “that was a fun algorithm design challenge,” he says. He also needed to create a server to retrieve the latest information, since the Pico wasn’t powerful enough to fetch it on its own. But, because the microcontroller connects periodically (“no more than every 30 minutes or so”) and displays information on an e-ink screen, the project is power-efficient. It’s also rather flexible.

“The data displayed on the calendar is presented in an agnostic format by the server, so I can always choose to add different sources by editing the Python code on the server (which is way easier to work with than the C++ running the display!),” Jaeheon says. “There are also many more features I want to add, such as a widget to show a basic weather forecast. The possibilities are endless!”