ePaper pricetags are becoming popular parts in the hacker community as a cheap way into tinkering with the technology. [Aaron Christophel] got his hands on a 4.4″ model with red, black, and white colors, and set about programming an ESP32 to drive the price tag instead.
The protocol the display uses was reverse-engineered by prompting the display to update via RF and monitoring the signals sent to between microcontrollers on the display’s control board. Once the protocol was understood, one of the microcontrollers could then be removed and replaced with an ESP32 for direct control. Implementing this takes some disassembly and some delicate soldering, but it’s nothing that should scare off an experienced hacker.
With the right code flashed to the ESP32, as available on Github, it’s possible to run the display directly. The hacked code does a great job driving the display, showing crisp lines and clean colors that indicate the e-Paper display is running properly.
We’ve seen [Aaron’s] work before in this area, when he hacked simpler two-color e-ink price tags. He’s also gone so far as creating entire wall displays out of salvaged displays, which is quite the sight. Video after the break.
What I wanna know is did those pricetag designers leave any passives for the rest of us??!? It looks like an Intel designed mainboard!
Yeah it’s an abnormal amount of passives on that board, right?! – I wonder if it was an early version from that company, so a bit of a dev board for them – but still, mass producing something with that many components, they must have been expensive as hell.
I would be interested in the RF portion of this
Now time to wait for the Chinese to make an eInk display based on this info…. How much are these compared to a 2″ OLED because they’re pretty cheap.
Sadly, it’s reached the time when we should not buy new products from China. If the stock is already paid for and outside the clutches of the CCP, fine go ahead, but no ‘new’ money should be fed in to China. Send your goodwill to India, Vietnam, Taiwan until China shows some respect for other political and ideological systems.
There simply is nothing like AliExpress from any other country though, right?
Sadly, it’s reached the time when we should not buy U.S. dollar anymore and reduce trade with U.S. If we have dollars in our country economy we should sell as much as possible and diversify our investments in other countries and trade more with other countries. No more U.S. dollar as global currency and weapon in the hands of global imperialistic hegemony that is U.S. Send your goodwill to India, Vietnam, Taiwan, Iran, until U.S. shows some respect for other political and ideological systems.
Good look getting stuff not from china.
Open anything you have now at home and see where the parts were produced.
Already now we outsourced almost everything and China produce almost everything.
Tell me you are a CCP bot without telling me you are a CCP bot …
That is simply not possible.
Where can we get such a price tag? It probably just falls of a shelf?
There’s also a version that has yellow instead of red. You’ll see those at Home Depot.
Pretty sure this is a 4.2″ GDEQ042Z21 from Good-Display. It talks SPI, the datasheet for the controller is freely available.
No. BOE Technology owns SES Imagotag and specializes in making displays. It’s one of the six E INK partners for promoting color epaper.
https://boevxusa.com/epaper-displays/