Digital labels at RAMM

RAMM’s Digital Media Officer, Helen Burbage, is leading the ‘Changing Stories: Connecting and collecting with Exeter’s communities’ project. Funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, the project will help the museum better reflect Exeter people’s histories and experiences in the museum’s catalogue and online content. One aspect of the project is adding digital labels to one of the permanent galleries, so we can quickly and flexibly display community comments about objects.

A project at Leicester Museums & Galleries inspired the decision to add digital labels to one of RAMM’s permanent galleries. They’ve successfully used e-ink labels to include community reflections in temporary exhibitions. We will add some digital labels to RAMM’s Making History gallery, to include a more diverse range of people’s thoughts and stories alongside existing museum interpretation.

Why choose e-ink screens for digital labels?

E-ink or e-paper displays mimic the appearance of ink on paper. E-readers such as Kindles are the most common use of e-ink, along with smartwatches and other wearables. The two main reasons for choosing e-ink screens for RAMM’s digital labels are their legibility and low power consumption.

E-ink screens have good readability, even at low light levels. This makes them a good choice for museum galleries where the lighting may have to be low in order to protect the objects on display.

Some research also suggests that e-ink screens are less likely to cause eye strain than backlit screens, making them a good choice for displaying text.

The screens only consume power when refreshing content so the battery can last for several months. An e-ink screen uses about 0.008% of the power of an equivalent LCD screen, so they are an environmentally responsible choice for RAMM.

Digital labels: hardware choices

When researching e-ink screen manufacturers, I discovered Soldered Electronics, who make the Inkplate. These devices combine an e-ink screen with an ESP32 microcontroller and can also connect to a range of other devices if needed. We have the flexibility of adding, for example, an NFC (near field communication) reader in the future. This would add a level of interactivity to the labels. The Inkplate hardware and software is all open source, so we can use Soldered’s ready-made SDKs (software development kits). Selecting an open-source option also means RAMM isn’t tied in to using proprietary software with ongoing licensing costs. Finally, Inkplates also use recycled Kindle screens, making them a more environmentally sustainable option and reducing electronic waste.  

Sharing knowledge

One big benefit of choosing an open-source solution is that RAMM can build on existing Inkplate projects and adapt them for our needs. We can then share our knowledge and learning back into the community for others to build on and reuse.

RAMM’s project has benefitted from the willingness of other Inkplate users to share their knowledge during the proof-of-concept stage. Phil Jones generously shared his experiences of Cornwall Museums Partnership’s ‘Responsive E-paper Adaptive Displays’ project, and sent a spare Inkplate 10 to use in testing. Professor Andy Hudson-Smith’s work with Inkplates and Raspberry Pis is the template for RAMM’s approach, and he kindly took the time to help troubleshoot some issues. Chris Twomey’s weather dashboard project also provided example code to use on the Inkplate.

Proof-of-concept digital label

Using the code above, the Inkplate 10 sent from Cornwall, and a Raspberry Pi 3 RAMM had from a previous project, I successfully set up a proof-of-concept digital label. The end process of updating the labels will be straightforward for RAMM staff. Firstly, we’ll add some e-ink friendly page templates to Collections Explorer. Then to change the label content staff will just edit the page for a particular label, and update the page. The changes will be picked up by scripts running on the Raspberry Pi and Inkplate, which will be connected to RAMM’s in-museum WiFi.

The setup for the label hardware is as follows:

• Once a day, the Raspberry Pi opens a specific webpage and waits for it to load. It then takes a screenshot of the page and saves it as a JPG.
• The Pi runs a server using Node Express at http://localhost:8080. The JPG is served here.
• Once a day, the Inkplate wakes, downloads the JPG, ‘draws’ it onto the screen, then re-enters deep sleep mode

If we want to update the digital labels more frequently, the timings of the scripts can be adjusted.

I used the AHRC Heritage Research website as the test destination. It’s a good example of the type of text-based content we want to display.

Next steps

Now I’m confident about setting up the Raspberry Pi and Inkplate, we can purchase some more devices for use in the museum. An Inkplate 10 was used for testing, but the Inkplate 6 is a better size to sit alongside existing museum labels. The Inkplate 6 will be perfect for visitor comments of around 100 words. The server side will be provided by the new Raspberry Pi 5. When the new hardware arrives, the next step will be to identify gallery locations for our new labels. Look out for a further update in the next few months!

Thanks to National Lottery players