Last week I got the parts in for a Raspberry Pi Zero that I intended to use as a portable FLAC player with a display, similar to an iPod Shuffle in function. It has a 1000mAh battery thanks to the UPS HAT from Waveshare, alongside a Audio DAC SHiM and Inky pHAT e-ink display both made by Pimoroni. While the portable audio player is still my ultimate plan for this device, one thing I wanted to try before that was building a script that would pull and display the latest posts from my Mastodon feed on the display! Here’s what that looks like.

I’ve made an archive of the relevant scripts which you can download here if you want to see how it was done; it’s mostly a messy hodgepodge of bash scripts and Python used to update the display. Every sixty seconds it fetches a new post and displays it. The screen is rather slow to update, so each post is on screen for roughly 50 seconds total. Every six minutes it instead displays a battery readout. The battery seems to last for four or five hours total, but could easily be expanded with a larger battery (which is an upgrade I’m considering along with a larger screen).