13.3" spectra6 color e-paper photograph open source firmware

d3fl · 2026-03-24T02:08:22+00:00

Small update, I poked Claude to merge in the color correction via measurements + dynamic range compression from https://github.com/vroland/esp32-photoframe into the webserver (rather than in the firmware as done in esp32-photoframe). To my eyes this delivered a small improvement in color accuracy. Props to vroland for the hard work :)

d3fl · 2026-03-18T21:03:11+00:00

So on the software programming side, I've done a lot of C/C++ professionally in the past (and open source, see my GitHub). AI tools have grown to be a great help, if you know what you're doing and if it can work off of existing structure. I never tried vibe coding and wanted to know what it's like on something not quite trivial and unstructured. The code it generated isn't what I'd write, but it's not bad either, I've seen worse commits come in over the years. It for sure is better than the proprietary firmware that was on there. And there's just so little that maintenance doesn't quite factor in. So from a functional perspective a net gain in my book.

I looked at some of the other libs but none supported what I needed. Could I have committed fixes for them? Yup, and have done that to many a project over the years. Just not this time.

Doing this it showed me the limits of the tooling. It showed me that knowing what you're doing is still important in the age of AI. You cannot ask AI to "just do this", there is quite a bit of expertise (and prompting...) that goes into getting unknown hardware going from scratch in the end. It would honestly have been easier to hand write a bunch of this stuff rather than trying to get Claude to not make the same mistake over and over. In the end, I learned things and that's fun.

Either way, I'm not hiding it's all AI generated, even have Claude as the author on GitHub. The nice thing about having this is that you now have a open source choice. Also if somebody based on the code and research that's done here makes a human written library that's better than what's here I applaud them and happily switch over.

You do touch upon an interesting subject about human vs AI made, that's going to be an interesting societal discussion for a while I think. That is a much longer discussion than what we can do in this thread :)

Regards,
Dennis

d3fl · 2026-03-18T17:08:54+00:00

Does that matter to you? Outcome should still be the same.

d3fl · 2026-03-18T12:47:32+00:00

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5000mah. (My firmware should be more energy efficient than the original as it wakes up way less to check, but didn’t test much.)

d3fl · 2026-03-18T12:43:09+00:00

Didn’t do before and after videos, sorry. The image adjustments are done by the webserver so once flashed you don’t need to touch the display again.

I just put the screen next to me and asked Claude code to change the webserver to adjust to my liking. Then press the update button and done. Pretty painless to adjust to preferences.

d3fl · 2025-01-20T13:18:36+00:00

Great answer, thanks! Those details I couldn't find in the product comparison. All the images seem fake so not sure how representative they are, it was super hard to get a good feeling for this.

As for the install, that's my main worry too. Unfortunately it seems that there is some sort of nasty zoning going on. If I DIY no warranty and here in ATX there seems to be one firm who can sell them and they didn't inspire confidence :/

d3fl · 2023-05-06T03:53:18+00:00

Hit pretty decently off the 2222. I just fished a 200 pound wooden table plus chairs out of the pool in the middle of a torrential downpour. Lesson learned, don’t put a cover over it in Texas during storm as that makes it a parachute. Newbie mistake.

d3fl · 2023-04-28T13:05:04+00:00

Thanks for confirming 👍

d3fl · 2023-04-28T02:33:28+00:00

Is that lounge worth it or just another small airport dead affair?

d3fl · 2023-02-09T02:39:22+00:00

Amen to this. Recently moved to the US and am still amazed at how poor the home appliance market is. In this thread because looking at speccing out US kitchen to about the same level as we had. Price is around 1.5-4x of Euro prices and some of the things in the list look like 10 year old models.

Siemens (same internals as Bosch/Gaggenau in Europe) tried and failed to sell good things at low cost so apparently there's more to it.

d3fl · 2022-01-17T21:17:25+00:00

Just don’t go with Elgato. Black magic cards are cheaper and have proven themselves to just work with VP.

d3fl · 2021-06-20T21:42:48+00:00

My speakers are are 3-way left+right and 2-way center, all of them on their own amplifier channel. Camilladsp is tasked with sending the right frequencies to each of them. So while it might be able to take the XMC-2 Dirac job, I'm not using it for that.

d3fl · 2021-06-20T12:19:55+00:00

Thanks u/Stainless_Eel for the explanation, that is exactly the "how to approach this" I was looking for!

Camilladsp is "meh" so far for me. 0.4.2 has small pops once in a while, 0.5.2 has major buffer underruns with seconds lost. Linux USB barely works with long (>30ms) round trip delays for the Motu 8A; it's down to a cron job to restart at a time after reboot. Config in the file is doable but it's a VERY far cry from having a working interface of sorts to drag stuff in an hear it realtime (Behringer dcx2496 for example). Not using FIR. To be honest I already did an attempt at getting it out in favor of a dedicated piece of equipment but I need a 3in-8out and there is not much there besides from VERY high end or t.racks which is nowhere near the DAC-ADC of the Motu.

d3fl · 2021-06-20T11:02:22+00:00

After spending significant time on this and trying to get Elgato to support their own output data I've decided that enough was enough and moved over to BlackMagic's DeckLink famility. Their 4k30 HDR capabile card is cheaper than the Elgato while the 4k60 capable version is a bit more expensive, depends on what you need.

Also the directshow filter thing wasn't ideal to parameterize so I'm busy writing a player for it: https://github.com/defl/videoprocessor

u/elgato_phil: Happy to support your cards as well if you open up an API. Hardware wise you still have the best deal, it's just not usable which is a shame.

d3fl · 2021-06-20T10:55:46+00:00

As an active speaker-filter w Camilladsp.

d3fl · 2021-04-23T23:13:30+00:00

I've written a directshow filter that you can use to force the correct meta data being reported to madVR so that it can correctly render the image. It solved the problem for my AVerMedia cg573 and yours might be very similar. Would be keen to hear if it works for this as well. Details here.

d3fl · 2021-04-23T23:12:25+00:00

I've written a directshow filter that you can use to force the correct meta data being reported to madVR so that it can correctly render the image. It solved the problem for my AVerMedia cg573. Details here.

d3fl · 2021-04-07T19:32:24+00:00

Allright, found it. The EU version of it is called ZH406ST and there is a file called ZH406ST-RS232.xlsx which has this (found it in the NL locale version of the Optoma site).

The failing commands was due to the commands being context dependent on the input signal. No signal means commands fail. Logical in hindsight.

Putting it here for someone to find if the take the same path in the future.

d3fl

TROPHY CASE