E-Paper, E Ink, or one of the several other ways to compose/capitalize this class of device is likely best-known in Amazon’s Kindle and other eBook readers. And why not? This technology is easy on the eyes, and only uses power when it changes what is displayed.
It’s such a neat concept that one would think it would be used in more projects. It does, however, have a few drawbacks like the fact that it generally doesn’t come in color, and doesn’t refresh fast enough for any sort of acceptable animation. The other important drawback from a DIY perspective is that they are relatively difficult to control. As seen in this Hackaday.io writeup, you can’t simply tell one pixel to be a certain shade of gray and expect it to work without some serious fiddling.
In other words, don’t get too excited when you accidentally damage your spouse’s Kindle…not that I would know anything about that.
The good news is that, at least to me, it seems like there’s an increased amount of E-paper hacking going on. One such example is this IoT door sign PCB shield, which allows you to attach an E-ink screen to an ESP8266 Dev 1.0 board. This looks like a perfect application for this tech, as the screen doesn’t need to be updated often, and can be viewed as needed by people passing an office. Note that this comes in the form of a PCB, and you’ll need to add several components to get it working.
