In my humble opinion—as I’ve mentioned elsewhere—ePaper is really an amazing display technology that has never really burst onto the mainstream. ePaper is incredibly energy efficient, requiring power only to change the display, the refresh rate is atrocious compared to television or smartphones, but seems to have been relegated to dedicated e-readers and the odd smartwatch. The natural outlet then would be makers and hobbyists, but options are less numerous than most other display methods.
The other market I could see for this type of device is as a static display, such as in office meeting rooms, or for weather and other stats which needs to only be updated intermittently. You can try to hack something together yourself, but the 2.9″ ESPaper Plus Kit has everything you need to get started with your semi-static display, including an ESP8266 WiFi module.
This means that your display can grab the info it needs over WiFi, then go back to sleep, running for weeks or even months on a single LiPo charge. Importantly, it’s also programmable in the Arduino IDE, and its creator Daniel Eichhorn has written a library to make creating your own display easy. There’s also a web app in the works to allow configuration via the web, which will be especially appealing to those who aren’t particularly comfortable programming in the Arduino IDE.
It looks like a great time to get started with this tech, and it’s wonderful to see Tindie serving as a market for awesome niche devices like this. The Plus Kit linked above includes a battery, programmer, and case, but the lite Kit is available without these accessories for $10 less.
