Your Life in X

Overview

Your Life in X is an embedded Rust project that displays a visual timeline of your life on an e-paper display. Inspired by Bryan Braun's Your Life in Weeks, this project renders a similar visualization on an tricolor e-ink display using an ESP32-C3 microcontroller. The goal is to provide a tangible, always-on representation of life's progress, leveraging embedded Rust as a learning experience.

Hardware

This project runs on:

• Microcontroller: ESP32-C3
• E-Paper Display: WeAct Studio 2.9-inch
• E-Paper Driver Library: A fork of weact-studio-epd, modified for 2.9-inch display development

Wiring Connections

E-Paper Pin	ESP32-C3 Pin
DC	21
RST	22
BUSY	23
CS/SS	15
SCK	6
MISO	Not used
MOSI	7

Project Structure

your-life-in-x/
├── esp/                      # ESP32-C3 firmware
├── simulation/               # Desktop simulation version
├── weact-studio-epd/         # Fork of EPD driver
├── your-life-in-x/           # Core logic for rendering the life timeline
├── docs/                     # Documentation and images
└── flake.nix                 # Nix-based development setup

Dependencies

This project is written in Rust and leverages several embedded development crates:

• embedded-graphics – Drawing primitives for e-ink displays
• display-interface-spi – SPI interface for the display
• embedded-hal – Abstraction for embedded hardware interfaces
• esp-hal – ESP32 hardware abstraction layer
• weact-studio-epd – E-paper display driver (forked for 2.9-inch support)

Building & Running

You can use the nix flake present in the project or install:

• Rust toolchain (install via rustup)
• cargo-espflash for flashing the firmware

Flashing to ESP32-C3

1. Install dependencies:

   rustup target add riscv32imc-unknown-none-elf
   cargo install cargo-espflash

2. Clone the repository and navigate to the ESP firmware directory:

   git clone https://github.com/jmarcelomb/your-life-in-x.git
   cd your-life-in-x/esp

3. Flash the firmware:

   cargo run --release /dev/ttyUSB0

   (Replace /dev/ttyUSB0 with the correct serial port.)

Running the Simulation

For quick development and testing, you can run a simulation version on your PC:

cd simulation
cargo run

Why This Project?

I created Your Life in X as a hands-on embedded Rust project to improve my skills and explore real-world applications of Rust in microcontroller-based systems. This project combines low-power hardware, SPI communication, and graphics rendering to bring a simple but thought-provoking visualization to life.

License

This project is licensed under MIT OR Apache-2.0, following the same dual-license model as Rust itself.