What's New

16 New Display Models (21 → 37 total)

Added support for the following Waveshare e-paper displays:

Bug Fixes

• Fixed incorrect resolutions in README for epd2in66, epd3in52, and epd6in2

A drop-in pure-Python emulator for Waveshare e-paper displays, enabling development and testing without physical hardware.

Features

• Flask web display mode — View your e-paper output in any browser with auto-refreshing frames. Enables remote development and headless environments (CI, SSH, containers) where a native GUI isn't available.

• Tkinter GUI display mode — Native desktop window for real-time e-paper visualization. Gives instant visual feedback during local development without needing a browser.

• 21 pre-configured Waveshare display models — JSON-based configs for models from 1.54" to 12.48", including multi-color variants (B/C, D). Eliminates manual resolution/color lookup and lets you switch models with a single parameter.

• batch() context manager — Groups multiple drawing operations into a single display update. Reduces unnecessary redraws and improves performance when composing complex layouts.

• Display border in Flask view (PR #2) — Adds a visible border around the e-paper image in the browser. Makes it easy to see the exact display boundaries, especially on white backgrounds.

• Configurable Flask port — Set the web server port instead of being locked to the default. Avoids conflicts when running multiple emulator instances or alongside other local services.

• In-memory frame serving — Flask serves display frames from a memory buffer instead of writing to disk. Eliminates disk I/O overhead and avoids file permission issues in restricted environments.

• Lazy GUI imports — Tkinter, Flask, and webbrowser are imported only when needed. Allows the package to install and tests to run cleanly in headless environments without GUI dependencies.

• Comprehensive test suite — Unit tests covering EPD initialization, drawing operations, config loading, Flask routes, and buffer output. Catches regressions early and documents expected behavior.

• CI/CD workflows — Automated testing, linting, and release publishing via GitHub Actions. Ensures every PR is validated and releases are built consistently.

• Python 3.14 compatibility — Updated dependencies (Pillow >= 10.0.0, Flask >= 3.0.0) and removed invalid tk pip package. Keeps the project working on the latest Python releases.

• GitHub issue templates & contribution guidelines — Structured templates for bug reports, feature requests, and AI/LLM usage. Lowers the barrier for contributors and keeps issues actionable.

Fixes

• Thread safety race condition in Flask mode (PR #3) — image_bytes is now initialized before the Flask server starts, and a threading.Lock protects shared state from concurrent access. Prevents AttributeError crashes on early browser requests.

• Clear() ignoring color parameter — Clear() always filled with white regardless of the color argument. Now correctly uses the caller's specified color.

• Update interval timing mismatch — The interval was stored ambiguously, causing incorrect refresh rates. Now stored in seconds and converted to milliseconds at each call site (Tkinter after() and Flask setInterval).

• Flask daemon thread cleanup — The Flask server thread is now set as a daemon, so the process exits cleanly when the main thread finishes instead of hanging indefinitely.

• Browser opens before server is ready — Deferred webbrowser.open() until the Flask server is actually listening. Eliminates the connection-refused error on startup.

• CI installing from missing requirements.txt — Switched to pip install from pyproject.toml, fixing broken CI pipelines.

• Flake8 lint errors — Cleaned up trailing whitespace, extra blank lines, long lines, and unused variables across the codebase.