How to install PaPiRus on your Raspberry

PaPiRus is a lovely little E-Ink screen for your Raspberry Pi project. In this how-to, I’ll try to explain what you need to do to make it work on your Raspberry Pi. I started from my Ubuntu Studio 19.10, but virtual any OS will do the first steps namely installing Raspbian.

We’ll start with a clean install of Rasbian, in our case a Buster Lite edition. So open a terminal window, and enter the following commands:

$ sudo fdisk -l
$ sudo umount /dev/sdb1
$ sudo umount /dev/sdb2
$ sudo dd if=./2019-09-26-raspbian-buster-lite.img of=/dev/sdb
$ sudo sync

Next up is to create an empty ssh file in the boot partition to be able to connect your berry remotely.

Eject you SD-Card in a lovely way to please your operating system 😉 Put the fresh SD-Card in your Pi, hook it up to your network, and power it up! Connect to your Raspberry

$ ssh pi@<your pi ipaddress>
The default password is: raspberry

We’ll configure your RPI using the raspi-config command.
$ sudo raspi-config

In options menu you can:
Localization Options – change your timezone 🙂
Being naughty Overclock (BE CAREFULL THIS MIGHT RUIN YOUR RASPBERY)

In advanced options menu you can:
Expand Filesystem of your Raspberry.
Make some nice Memory Split (16).

After finishing with raspi-config you will need to REBOOT 🙂

Now connect to your Raspberry and start the installation of PaPiRus.
Run the following line and PaPiRus will be set up and installed

$ curl -ssl https://pisupp.ly/papiruscode | sudo bash

If you want to be flexible choose for Python 2 and 3, else choose the one you fancy.
After a while you are able to select your screen size.
Choose your screen 🙂

You might run into the following error:
A dependency job for epd-fuse.service failed. See ‘journalctl -xe’ for details.

After installation, your Raspberry will want to reboot, after that you can connect to it again.

Do your ssh magic!
Now you can configure PaPiRus by using:

$ sudo papirus-config

Select your screen size, and start the display driver 🙂

After that PaPiRus should be working, which you can test by sending it commands (Note CTRL+Z stops your test commands):

$ papirus-test
$ papirus-clock

Or quote your favourite book, like I did…

$ papirus-write $’Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.’

So, if all is well your lovely little PaPiRus E-Ink screen is running smoothly on your Raspberry Pi, and waiting for your next level E-Ink Pi project.

Suggestions for improving this article are welcome, please let me know and drop me a line .