Does Running An E-Paper Display At 30 FPS Destroy It?

October 28, 2026 by Maya Posch 22 Comments

Although e-paper displays are famous for being low-power and lasting essentially forever if not damaged physically, the recent push to drive even cheaper e-paper displays at a framerate like 30 FPS for a decent monochrome gaming experience does raise a few questions. The first being what this does to the power usage of these displays, and the second whether this will wear out the display in short order. To investigate this, [Bo Made It] set up a few experiments.

Subject of this test was a Waveshare ESP32-S3-ePaper board, which had previously been demonstrated running a Game Boy emulator at 30 FPS. With this software running, the board consumed on average about 115 mA, which would run down the device’s 400 mAh battery in about 3.5 hours. From here key was to isolate the power consumption of the display itself, with the system minus the display updates consuming about 90 mA.

Running the frame calculations for the greyscale mode without rendering to the screen pushed that up to 107.6 mA, with even in the 30 FPS greyscale mode the display thus only consuming about 7.4 mA, which is vanishingly small. Clearly the low-power claims of e-paper remain intact even at higher framerates.

As for lifespan, one datasheet gives the typical lifespan as one million updates. This would translate to about 9.3 hours at 30 FPS, though that assumes a full display refresh. Since a smart driver only updates changed pixels, obviously this will be longer, but the question is how much longer, and what will degradation look like?

After running 2.16 million frames of a custom endurance test featuring repeating patterns, some ghosting was apparent, but repeated refreshing made this go away again. This means that so far no permanent damage has been detected within the no doubt conservative limit provided by e-paper manufacturers.

It should be noted that Waveshare itself also recommends against running such high-FPS applications on their device, meaning that this is definitely one big longevity experiment. If actual damage occurs, this means that obviously this won’t be covered under any warranty.

Check out our original coverage of this fast-e-paper hack.

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Front and back view of the 13.7" monitor kit

Modos Is Open Hardware, Easy On The Eyes

September 8, 2025 by Tyler August 25 Comments

Since e-ink first hit the market a couple decades back, there’s always murmurs of “that’d be great as a second monitor”— but very, very few monitors have ever been made. When the commecial world is delivering very few options, it leaves room for open source hardware projects, like the Modos Glider and Paper Monitor, projects now seeking funding on Crowd Supply.

As far as PC monitors go, the Modos isn’t going to win many awards on specs alone. The screen is only 13.3″ across, and its resolution maxes out at 1600 x 1200. The refresh rate would be totally unremarkable for a budget LCD, at 75 Hz. This Paper Monitor isn’t an LCD, budget or otherwise, and for e-ink, 75 Hz is a blazing fast refresh rate. Continue reading “Modos Is Open Hardware, Easy On The Eyes” →

A hand holds a charcoal-colored rectangle with a black and white screen in taking up most of its face. A bulleted list of items are displayed: "Start work on new blog, Update eSticky FW, Start working on eSticky PCB, New enclosure for eSticky, Buy 18650 battery, Buy 3DP extruder anycubic, FW Update Sigma 18-35."

ESticky Is A Paperless Post-It

August 23, 2025 by Navarre Bartz 22 Comments

E-paper screens have opened up a wide variety of novel use cases that just wouldn’t work with the higher power draw of an LCD. [gokux] thought it would be perfect for a digital sticky note.

Using a Waveshare 2.9″ e-paper display hooked up to a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32C3, a battery, and a switch all inside the 3D printed enclosure, the part count on this is about as simple as it gets. Once everything is soldered together and programmed, you get a nifty little display that can hold some of your thoughts without having to reopen an app to get to them.

Access is currently provided via a web page, and there are a few minor hiccups like text alignment and image upload support. This project is open source, so [gokux] has expressed interest in anyone wanting to help refine the concept. We think it might be nice to add a magnet on the back for an easier way to actually stick to things.

If you prefer a different way to use electricity for a sticky note, why not do it at 2,000 V? If that’s not your jam, how about a plotter that writes your label or message on masking tape?

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Inkycal Makes Short Work Of E-Paper Dashboards

September 12, 2024 by Tom Nardi 10 Comments

The e-paper “dashboard” is something we’ve seen plenty of times here at Hackaday. Use it to show your daily schedule, the news, weather, maybe the latest posts from your favorite hardware hacking website. Any information source that doesn’t need to be updated more than every hour or so is a perfect candidate. All you’ve got to do is write the necessary code to pull down said data and turn it into a visually attractive display.

Well, that last part isn’t always so easy. There are plenty of folks who have no problem cobbling together a Raspberry Pi and one of the commercially available e-paper modules, but writing the software to turn it into a useful information center is another story entirely. Luckily, Inkycal is here to help.

This open source project uses Python to pull information from a wide variety of sources and turns it into an e-paper friendly dashboard. It works with Waveshare displays ranging from 4.2 inches all the way up to the massive 12 inch tricolor panels. While it could theoretically be deployed on any operating system running a modern version of Python, it’s primarily developed to be run under Linux and on the Raspberry Pi. All of the versions of the Pi are supported, so no need to spring for the latest and greatest model. In fact, the notoriously pokey Raspberry Pi Zero is their recommended platform thanks to its low power consumption.

With Inkycal on the Pi — they even provide a pre-configured SD card image — and the e-paper display hooked up, all you need to do is pick which sources you want to use from the web-based configuration page. Look ma, no code!

Not feeling like putting the hardware together either? Well, we might wonder how you’ve found yourself on Hackaday if that’s the case. But if you really would rather buy then build, you can get a pre-built Inkcal display right now on Tindie.

E-Paper Wall Paper

March 15, 2023 by Matthew Carlson 7 Comments

Just like the clock clock of old, there’s something magical about a giant wall of smaller pieces working together to make a larger version of that thing. The E-Paper Wall 2.0 by [Aaron Christophel] is no exception as it has now upgraded from 2.9″ to 7.4″ screens.

On the 1.0 version, the bezels made it harder to make out the image. The larger screens still have bezels but the larger screen area makes it much easier to make out the image. 3D-printed clips hold the displays onto a plywood backer. We can marvel that e-ink price tags brought the price of e-ink down so that building a wall is still expensive but not eye-wateringly so. The 5×9 array likely uses a module sold on DigiKey for $47 each.

So aside from being willing to drop some money on a custom piece of art, what’s special about this? The real magic comes with the firmware and tooling that [Aaron] developed to flash custom firmware onto each of the 45 displays. A 100MHz ZBS243/SEM9110 8051-based controller lives inside each display and [Aaron] even has a Ghidra plugin to reverse-engineer the existing firmware. It only has 64kb of flash onboard, so [Aaron] devised a clever compression technique that enabled him to store complex images on the displays. A 3D-printed jig with pogo pins means flashing them doesn’t require soldering pins or headers, just drop it on and flash it with an Arduino with a helpful library [Aaron] wrote. A central station communicates with the various displays over ZigBee to send image updates.

The 8051 has a funny way of showing up in projects like this portable soldering iron or the TV Guardian. In many ways, it is a boon for us hackers as it makes it easier to reverse engineer and write new custom firmware when so many devices use the same architecture.

Continue reading “E-Paper Wall Paper” →

A Handy Breakout Board For E-Paper Hacking

June 15, 2022 by Tom Nardi 5 Comments

If you follow the exploits of [Aaron Christophel] (and trust us, you should), you’ll know that for some time now he’s been rather obsessed with electronic price tags, specifically those with e-paper displays. It’s certainly not hard to see why — these low-power devices are perfect for ambient displays, and their integrated wireless capabilities mean you can put one in every room and update them from a central transmitter.

But with such a wide array of products on the market, [Aaron] has found himself doing a lot of e-paper reverse engineering. This involves sticking a logic analyzer between the display and the tag’s microcontroller, which he found to be a rather finicky task. That’s why he created the Universal E-Paper Sniffer: a breakout PCB that lets you snoop on display communication without having to resort to unpleasant methods like scratching off the solder mask to tap into the traces by hand.

It’s a pretty simple gadget: on either side, you’ve got a connector for 24 pin 0.5 mm pitch flat flex cable, which [Aaron] has identified as the most common interface for these displays, and in the middle you’ve got a standard 2.54 mm pitch header. There are no other components on the board, and all the traces go right through to the other side.

Add a few jumpers and a cheap logic analyzer, and you’re ready to sniff some SPI commands. Check out the video after the break for a general walk-through of what it looks like to start sniffing around a new display.

The Gerber files for the breakout are available for free, or you can chose to buy a fabricated board through PCBWay to kick [Aaron] a portion of the sale price. However you get one, we think this will be a handy little tool to have around if you find yourself bitten by the price tag hacking bug.

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