[pikewood]

Waveshare is probably the easiest way to play with eInk today. If you're willing to look at different sizes, they offer displays with partial refresh already built in.

The 2.7 inch models are nice for people beginning with hardware because it's already built as a Raspberry Pi HAT, literally plug and play, no soldering or wires required. https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/2.7inch-e...

The bottom of that page lists the other models; look for the ones supporting partial refresh to get around that flashing distraction.

[brettcvz]

Agree, the waveshare modules are great. They’re also (surprisingly) available via Amazon Prime, which is nice when you’re excited about a project idea and don’t want to wait 2-3 weeks for a shipment from China.

From my experience with this project, all ePaper displays _can_ do partial refresh, but some may have the drivers (LUT) included, others you might have to find some community-sources ones or design it yourself. In the post I link to my drivers for partial updates for the 4.2”, and in the footnotes there is a YouTube video going into lots of detail on how the drivers work if you wanted to write one or update it for a different display.

[pikewood]

Could you send some links to the community you found who were hacking away on the partial refresh drivers? I have a 7.5" that I started with and would love to work off of whatever has already been accomplished.

[brettcvz]

I link to a few helpful sources in the “references” part of the project readme: https://github.com/brettcvz/upnext/blob/master/README.md#ref...

Hope that helps!