[Nursie]

You can get RP2040 based boards now for a handful of dollars. I've been working with a RP2040-zero (third party board) on an epaper side-project for the last few weeks.

They're a lot more plentiful than the mainstream Pi boards.

[HWR_14]

The eternal question of people working on epaper projects: have the panels finally become reasonably priced?

[Nursie]

I spent about $85 (AUD) on mine, it's a 5.83-inch tri-color (black/white/red), 648x480 display. For that much it came with the interface board so I could wire the display to my microcontroller easily enough.

I think that's reasonable cost-wise for my purposes (I'm making a status display to go inside my white-build gaming 'rig' to look shiny). Red takes about 12 seconds to refresh, AFAICT I should be able to get sub-1s black updates. You can get 7-color versions for about the same price but the refresh on those is very slow.

As ever it depends what you want to do - If you want a 2-inch tri-color display, in a format where you can attach SPI wires easily, you might get away with $20 AUD. You can find small greyscale eink displays very cheap (sub-$1) like this - https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003555154992.html

But you'll need to find some sort of interface from the ribbon cable to whatever wires you need.

If you want full-color, fast-update e-ink/epaper, that's just filtering into the market AFAICT, and it's much more pricey. I can find a 31.5 inch full-color epaper display for about $2200(US)!

(There's a video of it in action here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPnJh4QcjDY)

[e-_pusher]

Super cool - do you have a write up link for your tricolor screen project?

[Nursie]

I probably ought to make one :)

[geerlingguy]

Heh, it seems like affordable epaper and fusion energy are on the same plane of existence. Maybe one of them will become a reality in my lifetime.