E-paper Calendar: Raspberry Pi With E-ink Screen and Google Calendar API (Full Tutorial)

In this step we’re gonna make a nice lay-out. To get a good overview I have three imaginary colums: today, events later this week and events next week. To spread the information about this columns, just be creative with the x,y position of the draw text statement, and a lot of if statements. I enclosed the file to get you going.

Some explanation of the code

Current date (top left)

This creates the current date at the top left of the screen. It simply viewing the current date in different formats, using strftime. See this site for an overview of all the date formats.

  #TODAY
  draw.text((20, 20), date.today().strftime("%d"), font = font56, fill = 0)
  draw.text((90, 24), date.today().strftime("%B"), font = font24, fill = 0)
  draw.text((90, 50), date.today().strftime("%A"), font = font24, fill = 0)

  draw.text((20, 120), 'TODAY', font = font18, fill = 0)

Calendar events

This is a bit harder, mostly because Google returns both date events (whole day events) and datetime events (specific start time). What it does:

• Get the variables of the first event (startdate, starttime, enddate)
• Set startdate to current date, if an event started before today
• Check week of the event (if event is not today), if this is not the week of the previous event, then
• Current week? Display ‘later this week’
• Week after that? Display ‘next week’
• Week after that? To far away: stop loop
• Check day of event (if event is not today), is this not the day of the previous event, then
• Display ‘DAY Month – date’
• If all the above is done, display the actual calendar event

 #Loop trough calendar events and draw them to buffer
  x = 20    #start position on x-axis of events on e-ink screen
  y = 140    #start position on y-axis of events on e-ink screen
  curweek = '' #variable for week of event
  curday = ''  #variable for day of event

  for event in events:
    start = event['start'].get('dateTime', event['start'].get('date'))
    end = event['end'].get('dateTime', event['end'].get('date'))
    summ = event['summary'] 

    if len(start) == 10: #events that are 'whole day'-events
        startdate = datetime.datetime.strptime(start,"%Y-%m-%d")
        enddate = datetime.datetime.strptime(end,"%Y-%m-%d")
        time = ''
    if len(start) == 25: #events that start at specific time
        startdate = datetime.datetime.strptime(start,"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z")
        enddate = datetime.datetime.strptime(end,"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z")
        time = startdate.strftime(" (%H:%M)")
    startdate_date = startdate.date()  
    if startdate_date < date.today(): #multi day events, set start date at current date
      startdate = date.today()
      startdate_date = date.today()
    day = startdate.strftime("%a %m-%d")
    week = startdate.strftime("%V")



    if curweek != week and startdate_date != date.today():      
      if (week == date.today().strftime("%V")):      
        x = 280
        y = 25
        draw.text((x, y), 'LATER THIS WEEK', font = font18, fill = 0)
      elif (int(week) == int(date.today().strftime("%V"))+1):
        x = 530
        y = 25
        draw.text((x, y), 'NEXT WEEK', font = font18, fill = 0)       
      else:
        break
      curweek = week
      y = y + 25

    if curday != day and startdate_date != date.today():
      draw.text((x, y+4), day.upper(), font = font18, fill = 0)
      curday = day
      y = y + 20

    draw.text((x, y),' ' + event['summary'] + time, font = font15, fill = 0)  
    y = y + 20

Refresh time

To see if there has been an update, you can display the date and time of the refresh very small in the lower right corner.

Read more: E-paper Calendar: Raspberry Pi With E-ink Screen and Google Calendar API (Full Tutorial)