A Massive ePaper Matrix

ePaper screens are quite a neat piece of technology. With their low refresh rates, and the fact that they only need power to change what’s on display, not to actually display something, they can be used for price tags that might need to be updated once every few days at the most. Aaron Christophel got ahold of roughly 3,000 electronic price tags from 2013, and decided to recycle them in a very creative way a mega-ePaper display.

The combined device currently consists of a 16x13 arrangement of little screens, forming 208 pixel matrix, with the eventual plan to make it a 16x16 setup. The original plan was a 32x16 matrix, but Christophel now envisions 16x16, or 256 of these screens, as being enough to be quite interesting.

Eventually it may become a clock, or a scrolling text display, but for now he’s still working out the details of the matrix. It refreshes like a snake at this point, which looks very cool in and of itself, but may not be ideal for generalized usage.

On the back, Christophel has soldered onto each screen’s 3.3V and ground rails for power, as well as the UART serial line for signaling. An ESP32 takes care of serial commands, breaking things up into four sections of 64 screens/pixels each (minus, apparently, the three lines in progress).

As Christophel puts it, “It really looks quite fascinating,” which, as a big fan of ePaper myself, I would agree wholeheartedly. Check it out in the video below, followed by an earlier clip introducing the concept a bit more.