Raspberry Pi drives daily Calvin and Hobbes comic fun via E-ink display

There’s nothing quite like cracking open the funnies to find your favorite comic strip. Today we’ve got a Raspberry Pi project that harnesses that energy and compresses it into a beautiful E-Ink display. Maker and developer Doctr_sbaitso is a Calvin and Hobbes fan and decided to create a framed display that automatically shows a new Calvin and Hobbes comic every day.

It’s important to note that this doesn’t just show a random Calvin and Hobbes comic but rather displays them each day in the order they were released. This mimics the experience you would have in real life reading them in the newspaper every day. These comics originally ran from 1985 until 1995 so the project should provide plenty of daily entertainment for the next decade.

It’s not enough to throw the hardware together, however. Presentation is key when it comes to a build like this! Doctr_sbaitso decided to house everything inside of a nice picture frame. According to Doctr_sbaitso, the E-Ink display he’s using is easily housed in a standard 5 x 7″ photo frame. This makes the project not only fun but a nice decorative asset in the home.

In the original project thread, Doctr_sbaitso was kind enough to share details about the hardware he chose to use in the setup. The main board powering the project is a Raspberry Pi 4 but it’s not a very power-demanding setup so you could easily get away with a smaller board, like a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W if that’s what you have on hand. The Pi is connected to a Waveshare 7.5-inch E-Ink display and uses a HAT driver to bridge the connection between the two.

The Pi is running Raspberry Pi OS and uses a Python script to display a new Calvin and Hobbes comic every day. The comics must be formatted to have a specific resolution, 800 x 480px, to display properly on the E-Ink panel so the Python script handles this processing. This script runs daily by scheduling it with Cron.

If you want to get a closer look at this Raspberry Pi project, you can check out the original project thread shared to the Calvin and Hobbes subreddit over at Reddit.