Poetry Box

For Christmas 2019, I made my partner a box that displays a random poem on an e-Ink screen. The main inspiration was a short story dispenser that we came across at the Austin Public Library. After seeing this, I saw several projects on r/arduino of people making their own poem dispensers and the like. Not wanting to waste paper, I decided to make my own using the Pimoroni wHAT e-Ink display, a Raspberry Pi Zero W, and an old cigar box.

The result is a box that displays a random poem every 5 minutes in a format that can be upgraded at a future date. If a poem is too large to fit on the screen, the button can be used to page forward in the poem, or select a new poem when the current poem has been completed.

The Code

The code itself is divided into two parts – a Jupyter notebook that lives on a server at my house to collect poems, and a Python library on the Raspberry Pi which handles the choosing and display of a poem. The whole code library can be found on my gitlab. The jupyter notebook acts as an example of using selenium