e-paper display

10 Articles

Front and back view of the 13.7" monitor kit

Modos Is Open Hardware, Easy On The Eyes

September 8, 2025 by 26 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 21 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?

Continue reading “ESticky Is A Paperless Post-It” →

Inkycal Makes Short Work Of E-Paper Dashboards

September 12, 2024 by 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 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 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.

Continue reading “A Handy Breakout Board For E-Paper Hacking” →

E-Paper Clock Displays Things In A Battery-Friendly Manner

May 15, 2022 by 20 Comments

Clock builds are a hacker staple, and many overflow with power-thirsty LEDs and network features. This build from [mattwach] takes quite the opposite approach, sipping away at its batteries thanks to an e-paper based design.

The build relies on a small Waveshare e-paper module which only requires power when the display is actually changing. When static, the display needs no electricity, and this helps save a great amount of power compared to OLED or LCD-based clocks.

An Atmega328p is the heart of the build, running off a 32.768 KHz clock crystal for a combination of precise timekeeping and low power draw. Time is ensured to be both precise and accurate thanks to a GPS module which allows the clock to sync to satellite time when powered up. It’s a common way to sync clocks to a high-quality time source. Most of the time, though, the GPS is kept powered down to save the 30-100 mA that the module typically draws when in use.

Other features include a temperature, humidity, and pressure sensor, with ambient pressure graphed over time. There’s also notification of sunrise and sunset times, along with the current phase of the moon. It’s all wrapped up in a case tastefully manufactured using 3D printed parts and some wooden CNC-cut panels for a nice rustic look.

With the e-paper display and the microcontroller configured for low-power operation, the clock will run for around 6 months on four AAA cells. Overall, it’s a nifty little clock that will provide the time, date, and other information without the need for an Internet connection. Video after the break.

Continue reading “E-Paper Clock Displays Things In A Battery-Friendly Manner” →

Sunlight-Based Life Clock Predicts Your Darkest Hour

June 16, 2021 by 9 Comments

The past year has been quite a ride for everyone on Earth. But you never know which day is going to be your last, so you might as well live a little, eh? This clock doesn’t actually know when you’ll kick off, either. But just for fun, it predicts the number of years remaining until you go to that hackerspace in the sky by hazarding a guess that’s based on your current age and the latest life expectancy tables. Don’t like the outcome? It’s completely randomized, so just push the button and get a set of numbers: the age you might die, and the percentage of life elapsed and remaining.

We love the design of this calculated doom clock, and it’s quite simple inside — an Arduino Pro Mini outputs the graph on an 2.9″ e-paper display, and both are powered with a 5.5 V solar panel. Just suction cup that puppy to the window and you’ll get automatic updates about your impending demise on sunny days, and none on cloudy days.

Want a more realistic picture of your mortality? Here’s a clock that counts down to your 80th birthday.

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