e-paper

81 Articles

Tiny E-Paper Display Delivers 30 FPS Of Game Boy Fun

October 14, 2026 by 6 Comments

Slow refresh, ghosting and low-contrast — wait, are we talking about passive matrix LCDs, or e-paper displays? That might be why e-paper Game Boy emulators are a thing: the limitations of the black-on-grey e-paper screens remind us of the grey-on-green LCDs Nintendo used in the 80s. In this case [Bo Made It] made it out of a Waveshare ESP32-S3-ePaper-1.54, and got 30 FPS from it. 

Now, regular readers might be thinking, “So, we’ve seen the 60 FPS e-paper monitor, how is this special?” It’s a fair question. The answer is that [Bo] is doing this on a randomly chosen dev board with a built in wavetable e-paper controller, rather than the bare inputs that allowed the [Wenting Zhang]’s project to work. On the other hand, [Bo] does credit [Wenting], particularly his e-ink PaperBoy project, with directly inspiring both the project and his implementation.

Again, the big difference is going through the blob of the controller, but it turns out you can still address individual pixels through it. [Bo] gave each pixel a ‘budget’ for up to 8 pulses it depending on how much it needs to change, speeding things up immensely. Our favorite part is how he achieves the Game Boy’s 4-bit greyscale by, in effect, deliberately ghosting the display. Pixels aren’t driven long enough to fully flip them if they’re going only one shade lighter or darker. This complicated matters, since going from black to ‘white’ now takes longer than ‘white’ to the next darker grey, and the exact timing needs to be worked out for each color transition. Getting that timing right took a lot of calibration, and we like how he used video to help automate the process.

That process is still ongoing, so there’s no GitHub link yet. [Bo] will open source everything when it’s ready, and we look forward to it. We also look forward to the PDA-like device he’s going to be using this display driver for. If this all sounds similar to a recent 20 FPS e-paper hack, that’s because it’s the same underlying technology.

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The Birds Outside, Drawn For You Automatically

September 4, 2026 by 23 Comments

With artificial intelligence being the bête noir of the moment, there are some projects using it which maybe don’t bring much to the table. So it’s nice to see one that uses it in a creative way, and delivers something new. [arnegiacomo]’s e-paper screen is a great example, as it draws a picture in real time of whatever birds are outside.

Behind the quite large screen sits a Raspberry Pi 5, and on that is BirdNet-Go, an AI-powered birdsong classifier. A USB microphone catches the birdsong, and Birdnet comes up with the species. The birds on the display are then those species as pictures from 19th century bird spotters guides, assembled into a collage. You can even see what the current set of birds it hears are, live, and they are a representative cross section of the European birds you’d find in Norway where it’s located.

We like this project, both for the bird book vibe it gives, and the creative use of machine classification. Surprisingly this isn’t the first project in this field we have seen over the years.

20 FPS On E-Paper Display Without Help

July 21, 2026 by 30 Comments

If electronic paper displays have one downside, it’s generally refresh rate. Earlier versions of the tech might only have been able to do single-digit frames per second, while modern, mid-range devices can sometimes manage 10-20 FPS — and that’s not including the frames needed to blank the display. Getting up past that double-digit barrier typically requires higher-end displays, more powerful processors or FPGAs, and more money. On the other hand, [Tony] was recently able to get 20 FPS out of an ESP32-based device without using any extra processing power.

The key to improving e-paper performance is understanding how the display actually works. The “ink” consists of microscopic charged pigment particles that physically move in response to electric fields, making the display much slower than LCD or OLED panels. Rather than fully erasing and redrawing every frame, the software takes advantage of the particles’ existing state by generating optimized driving waveforms that only move the particles needed to produce the next image. On the software side, an MPEG-like encoding is used so only changes between frames are transmitted and converted into these waveforms, reducing unnecessary data transfers and allowing much higher frame rates.

[Tony]’s method is able to drive 960×540 panels, like those found in the Lilygo or M5PaperS3, to 20 FPS, and these platforms are based on nothing more than the capable but limited ESP32 chip. It’s an impressive push, and worth checking out the video in the linked project page. We assume you’d need a little more to drive something like the massive e-paper display found in this home automation setup, though.

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Modern E-Ink Dashboards, Kindle And Otherwise

July 3, 2026 by 13 Comments

People have been attempting to turn Kindles into more than e-readers since the first devices came out nearly two decades ago. The e-ink displays are low-power and great for displaying information that doesn’t refresh too often, and with Amazon continuing their trend of bricking their older devices there will be more of these devices available. [Hemant] built a weather dashboard with one of his, but since then had requests for other types of e-reader dashboards and has a guide for making more general-purpose use of an old Kindle.

The first approaches outlined here involve the installation of a dashboard client on the Kindle and pointing it at a server that hosts a PNG image of whatever information needs to be displayed. The client simply displays that image and refreshes it at predetermined intervals. There are a number of options for creating that server as well, including using Home Assistant for those who already have a home automation system deployed. The benefit of using Home Assistant is that it’s much more straightforward to gather data for the dashboards from sensors and other peripherals that are already installed.

Installing a client like this might seem straightforward, and it can be, provided that the Kindle involved is jailbroken or capable of being jailbroken. An Amazon update recently broke many modern devices’ ability to execute the jailbreak, so not every Kindle can do this anymore. But [Hemant] goes into detail about this and also outlines some methods for using generic e-ink displays instead, and also dives into the hardware and software behind building a server to host the dashboard images for those without Home Assistant already running. It’s a great overview for those who have always wanted something like this but never knew where to start.

Bilingual E-paper News Feed Helps Brush Up Language Skills

June 1, 2026 by 4 Comments

[Bob] recently completed LanguageLearner, a desktop device that increases his exposure to a second language by offering up bite-sized news items in Italian, with a complementary English translation. Even better, it’s a project made almost entirely from inexpensive parts he had on hand; it consists of little more than a Raspberry Pi Pico W, a 4.2″ E-paper display, and a 3D-printed stand.

Here’s how it works: once every few hours, the system wakes up and uses its WiFi connection to fetch news from an Italian RSS feed. Having chosen a slice of current events, it translates to English with an API call then displays both versions on the display: original Italian up top, translated English below.

Consisting of little more than a Raspberry Pi Pico W, an E-paper display, and a 3D-printed stand, it’s a great use of spare parts.

E-paper is ideal for a semi-passive project like this because once data is written to the display, there it remains without needing power or upkeep of any kind. Perfect for a device that only wakes up every few hours for an update before going right back to sleep.

Due to the limited RAM of the Raspberry Pi Pico [Bob] has to be purposeful about fetching data, so he relies on text from a simple RSS feed to avoid running out of memory while making web requests. The other minor quibble is that the driver for the display only handles plain ASCII; characters that cannot be rendered are displayed as grey boxes, which you can see in the image up top. Still, it gets the job done.

Increasing exposure to a language one is learning is beneficial, and people like to experiment. From trying to optimize human wait times by inserting language micro-lessons to a calculator that works in Toki Pona, technology offers new ways for folks to experiment with how we learn and play with language.

TagTinker Lets You Hack Electronic Shelf Labels

May 4, 2026 by 72 Comments

Was there ever anything wrong with simple paper price labels? Absolutely not. And yet, the world invented the electronic price tag anyway. If you happen to come across some of these devices and want to hack them, you might like TagTinker from [i12bp8].

TagTinker is a Flipper Zero application specifically built for talking to infrared electronic shelf labels (ESLs). These are e-paper devices that receive commands and updates via an infrared interface, and they’re relatively simple to talk to. [i12bp8] built upon previous work from [furrtek] which revealed the protocols used to update these devices, and implemented it into an app that runs on the Flipper. It can do neat things like scan the NFC tags built into ESLs to ID them, deploy bitmap images to the tags, or run live-updated dashboards on the devices with the aid of a Flipper WiFi devboard.

If you’ve always wanted to play with these tags but didn’t want to do the grunt work yourself, it just got a whole lot easier to mess around. Though, it’s worth noting, [i12bp8] has strictly prohibited any illegal uses of this app, so be good out there. We’ve seen these tags repurposed before, too – who knew they could make such good conference badges? 

DIY E-Reader Folds Open Like A Book

December 24, 2025 by 37 Comments

There are plenty of lovely e-readers out on the market that come with an nice big e-paper display. There aren’t nearly as many that come with two. [Martin den Hoed] developed the Diptyx e-reader with such a design in order to better replicate the paper books of old. 

The build is based around the ESP32-S3, a powerful microcontroller which comes with the benefit of having WiFi connectivity baked in. It’s hooked up to a pair of 648×480 e-paper displays, which are installed in a fold-open housing to create the impression that one is reading a traditional book. The displays themselves are driven with custom look-up tables to allow for low-latency updates when turning pages. The firmware of the device is inspired by the epub reader from [Atomic14], and can handle different fonts and line spacing without issue. Power is from a pair of 1,500 mAh lithium-polymer cells, which should keep the device running for a good long time, and they can be charged over USB-C like any  modern gadget.

You can follow along with the project on the official website, or check it out on Crowd Supply if you’re so inclined. The project is intended to be open source, with files to be released once the design is finalized for an initial production run.

We’ve seen some great DIY e-reader builds over the years, and we’re loving the development we’re seeing in the writer deck space, too. If you’re whipping up something fun in this vein, be sure to let us know on the tipsline!