Welcome to einky

einky is a custom handheld console designed to run Ren'Py visual novels and narrative games on an e-ink display.

An End-of-Studies Project (EIP) developed at Epitech Montpellier.

What is einky?

einky runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W with a 3.97" e-ink panel (800×480px). The core goals are:

• Minimal battery consumption — e-ink holds a frame without power
• Zero blue light emission — no backlit screen
• Distraction-free reading — purpose-built for visual novels

The system runs a custom Raspbian-based OS and the vanilla Ren'Py SDK orchestrated by a custom runtime. The runtime supervises a Ren'Py-based launcher game that acts as the boot menu, captures frames from a virtual framebuffer, and streams them to the e-ink panel over SPI.

How it works

Runtime (Python supervisor) starts vanilla Ren'Py SDK
  → Ren'Py game (launcher or selected title) renders headless under Xvfb
  → Frame captured by Python/Pillow
  → Resize → Greyscale → Floyd-Steinberg dither
  → SPI driver (C) → GDEM0397T81P e-ink panel

The launcher is itself a Ren'Py game, not a Python wrapper around Ren'Py. At boot, the runtime starts the launcher game; selecting a title swaps the active project and re-launches the SDK against the new game.

Project links

Resource	Link
GitHub Organization	einky
Documentation	docs.einky.fr

Where to go next

• Prerequisites — what you need to build or run einky
• Setup — how to get the project running
• Developer onboarding — clone the workspace via meta/bootstrap.sh
• Architecture — how all the pieces fit together