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by goliatone 1913 days ago
There is the m5paper[1] that is around $80 with shipping. It uses an esp32 and is arduino compatible, and the provided libraries are pretty good.

[1] https://docs.m5stack.com/#/en/core/m5paper

2 comments

Oh my gosh. I've spent hours looking for something like this, and was never able to find one. Unfortunately they're out of stock right now, but I'll be ordering one as soon as I can. Thanks!
I once bought a small E-Paper display [1] for a Raspi, and was very disappointed with the refresh rate, it was useless.

I wanted to use it to display room temperature and electrical information like home power consumption, solar panel power generation and stuff like that, and expected a refresh rate of around 1 update per second.

Having it blink and do stuff for around 7 seconds just to redraw the next frame made me send it back and replace it with a small LCD touchscreen [2].

[1] Waveshare 1.54 Inch E-Paper Raw Display Panel(B) V2,200x200 Resolution,3.3v [ https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B074P32F9B ]

[2] ELEGOO Display 3.5" Zoll TFT LCD Touch Screen Monitor 480x320 für Raspberry Pi mit Allen Daten und Touch Pen (SPI Schnittstelle) [ https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B01JRUH0CY ]

Edit:

Look at all that needs to happen just to update the minute counter as well as the temperature and humidity. It certainly is faster than the colored display I bought, but still, do you really want such a flashing display? https://youtu.be/v9sNzmtMSXo?t=164

This apparently is about driving the ePaper correctly to produce intended image and not just using it as dumb framebuffer. The demo firmware for above mentioned M5Paper seems to have some support for intelligent driving of the display, sadly this is mostly not exposed to the (currently marked as alpha) MicroPython implementation for the device, where it only supports full (ie. "blinking") updates of rectangular regions.
Waveshare has some displays with really nice refresh rates, I bought a 6" one with ~300ms refresh rate: https://www.waveshare.com/6inch-HD-e-Paper-HAT.htm
Pity it deteriorates with ultraviolet rays