While the price of electronic newspaper has fallen far over the last few years, it’s still relatively expensive when compared to more traditional display technology. Accordingly, we’ve seen a lot of interest in recovering the e-paper displays used in electronic rack names and purchaser e-readers from the likes of Amazon, Barnes& Noble, and Kobo. Unfortunately, while these devices are generally be purchased inexpensively on the second hand market, liberating their exposes is often very complex a task for the average tinkerer.

Enter the Inkplate. With their open equipment ESP3 2 proliferation timber that plugs into the e-paper displays salvaged from aged e-readers, the team at e-radionica is able to turn what was essentially electronic waste into a WiFi-enabled multipurpose display that can be easily programmed employing either the Arduino IDE or MicroPython. The $99 Inkplate 6 clearly struck a chord with the maker society, rocketing to 926% of its fund point on Crowd Supply back in 2020. A year later e-radionica released the larger and more refined Inkplate 10, which managed to break 1,000% of its goal.

For 2021, the team is back with the Inkplate 6PLUS. This updated version of the original Inkplate incorporates the design adds-on from the Inkplate 10, such as the Real-Time-Clock, expanded GPIO, and USB-C port, and uses a expose recycled from newer readers such as the Kindle Paperwhite. These e-paper boards are not only sharper and faster than their predecessors, but also feature touch assist and LED front illuminate; abilities which e-radionica has made full advantage of in the most recent version of their application library.

With its Crowd Supply expedition recently crossing over the 100% score, we got a chance to go hands-on with a prototype of the Inkplate 6PLUS to see how e-radionica’s latest hacker friendly e-paper development platform grips up.

Room to Grow

The average Hackaday reader is well aware of the capabilities the ESP3 2 brings to the table: right out of the box you’ve got an impressively potent processor, WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, and some of the best power saving aspects available on a hobby microcontroller. It’s a excellent candidate for the kinds of duties most tribes would want to do with an electronic article presentation, and e-radionica were smart to make it the centerpiece of their commodity. They even ricochet for the ESP3 2-WROVER form, with an expanded 8 MB of RAM.

Of course, if all you wanted was an ESP3 2 plugged into an e-paper display, you could get a module from mortal like Waveshare and be done with it. Which is why e-radionica included so many extra features on the Inkplate 6PLUS. You don’t need to wire in an external SD reader, because one’s already there. Need an RTC? All you have to do is slot in a battery. They even included a lithium ion bill controller and a connector for a artillery bundle, should you want to roll your very own e-reader.

Hungry for more? As you’d expect, the ESP3 2′ s I2C interface can be used to connect up numerous sensors or even secondary parades should you need them for your projection. But if you’re worried about the notoriously limited GPIO on the ESP3 2, don’t be. Since the Bill of Material for the board already included a sixteen direct MCP2 3017 IO expander that the microcontroller needed to interface with the e-paper display, e-radionica decided to add another one in for good measure.

All of the pins for the secondary MCP2 3017 are broken out along the edge of the Inkplate 6PLUS, giving you plenty of breathing room for future swellings. The standard width bolt header even includes anchor and 3.3 V threads, which should make it easy to put together daughterboards which plug right into the back of the display.

Legendary Performance

Even though it’s arguably the whiz of the evidence, I won’t spend much occasion talking about the 1024 x 758 e-paper display on the Inkplate 6PLUS. That’s because anyone who’s used a first or second generation Kindle Paperwhite has already seen it. While it might be a couple changes behind the screen used in the current generation Kindle, it’s still a marvelous exhibition. This isn’t some hokey board from a nameless eBay seller, it’s literally the same screen that once mercy the world’s more popular e-reader.

https :// hackaday.com/ wp-content/ uploads/ 2021/06/ inkplate6p_video. mp4

Images and verse are snappy, and the lightning-fast partial refreshes actually complement its touch capabilities. While full screen freshens still take a beat or two, the panel is more than up to the challenge of exposing dynamic data and interactive menus.

Make the Ground Running

Between e-radionica’s careful committee pattern and industry standard exhibition engineering, there’s no denying that the hardware here is excellent. But in this community, that’s only half the clash. If you want to succeed, you’ve got to have skilled open source libraries, plenty of pattern code, and documentation that’s clear enough for absolute novices to understand but still deep enough to satisfy the hardcore hackers.

On all those breasts, I’m happy to say e-radionica has delivered. Getting the presentation operating with the Arduino IDE is about as quick and easy as humanly possible: precisely add the URL for the board descriptions, install the Inkplate library through the browser, and flash one of the patterns. Depending on your operating system you might have to install motorists for the board’s CH340 USB-to-serial converter, but that’s it. At the time of this writing the MicroPython module for the 6PLUS is unavailable, but looking at the process for get it up and running on the previous Inkplates, it was like it won’t be far more difficult to get going.

Browsing through the official documentation unveils a property of resources, such as a ended API reference for the Arduino and MicroPython environments, and tools like the web-based GUI designer or image converter can really help climb start your project. Even if you’ve never is cooperating with an e-paper display or touch screen before, the team has prepared sure you have everything you need to bring your idea to life.

A Worthy Investment

While overall I located the Inkplate 6PLUS hardware and software to be extremely superb, I did notice a few quirky oddities. The timber would often fail to reboot itself after having brand-new code flashed, and on several occasions went into a sort of rapid boot curve. The screen is also inverted in the current version of the library, necessitating you to add display.setRotation( 2) at the top of each program to get it into the proper orientation. But these are really very minor quibbles, and considering this is still prototype hardware, it’s entirely possible these issues will be resolved before it starts shipping to backers.

If there’s any real fault with the Inkplate 6PLUS for most people, it’s going to be the cost. At $159 it’s a tough sell for those just looking to dip their toes in the sea, but in truth, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If all you want to do is add a little e-paper weather display to your table, this probably isn’t the product for you. Time grasp a inexpensive 2.13 module from eBay and plug it into the header on a Pi Zero, there’s plenty of prior art to get you started.

But if you miss a serious electronic newspaper exploitation stage that’s fully open source and scalable to whatever project you could come up with down the line, you’d be hard pulped to find a better alternative than the Inkplate 6PLUS at any price.

Read more: hackaday.com