ExtractToInk is a minimal, end-to-end demo project that shows how to extract live data from the web using Zyte API and render it on an e-ink display.
It scrapes gold and silver prices from website and displays them on an Inky pHAT e-ink screen using a Raspberry Pi.
It shows how to:
- Use Zyte Extract API to fetch fully browser rendered HTML
- Parse structured data using CSS selectors
- Separate scraping logic from rendering logic
- Render clean, high-contrast UI on an e-ink display
- Build a real-world, physical output from web data
Think of it as:
From web data → physical display, with no dashboards in between.
- Raspberry Pi on RaspberryPi OS (tested on Pi Zero 2 W)
- Pimoroni Inky pHAT (Black / SSD1608)
- 5V power supply
- Python 3
- Zyte Extract API (browserHTML:true)
- Requests
- BeautifulSoup
- Pillow
- Inky Python library
- Fredoka One font
Website (JS-heavy)
↓
Zyte Extract API
↓
Rendered browserHTML
↓
BeautifulSoup + CSS selectors
↓
Structured price data
↓
Pillow image rendering
↓
Inky pHAT e-ink display
#1 Install Raspberry Pi OS
#2 Attach the e-ink display
#3 boot the pi
#4 Update the pi
sudo apt update && sudo apt -y upgrade
#5 Enable i2c and SPI using
sudo raspi-config
#6 reboot
for this example I am using Pimoroni e-ink pHat, but every vendor has a support package just find and install it. for example, for pimorini the instructions are available on their product page, if you're using same e-ink you can follow along or after your setup move to next step.
git clone https://github.com/pimoroni/inky
cd inky
./install.sh
pip install zyte-api requests beautifulsoup4 pillow
Inside your raspberry pi (using ssh or otherwise)
- clone the project
git clone https://github.com/yourusername/extract-to-ink.git
cd extract-to-ink
- Create a .env file and add your Zyte API key
echo "ZYTE_API_KEY = "YOUR_API_KEY_HERE" > .env
- Run the project
python main.py
The display shows:
- Gold buy price
- Gold sell price
- Silver price
- Last refreshed timestamp
- Run it via cron every 10 minutes or 4 hours
- Add more commodities, stocks or currencies
- Display price deltas (▲ ▼)
- Add diff-based refresh (update only when data changes)
- Turn it into a systemd service
- Swap e-ink for another output (LED, PDF, dashboard)
Zyte community members Developers learning web scraping Raspberry Pi & e-ink hobbyists
Q. E-ink display not getting detected : A. Make sure you enabled i2c and SPI
Q. How can I make data refreshed automatically A. Create a cronjob to run main.py after your desired interval
Q. Zyte API call failed A. Make sure Zyte API key is correctly set in a .env file located in same directory.