NiceThing's E-paper Breakout Board Makes Using BuyDisplay, Waveshare Displays a Cinch

NiceThing's Martin Černý has released a board which aims to make it easier to use low-cost ePaper electrophoretic displays in your projects: the E-paper Universal Breakout Board.

ePaper displays, of which those from the E Ink company are the most well-known, are incredibly versatile. Designed for information that changes relatively infrequently, they offer full sunlight readability and draws power only when updating: Pull the plug, and the screen will continue to display whatever was on it before the power went away.

To make integrating these marvellous panels into future projects as easy as possible, Černý has developed a "universal" breakout — "universal," as it's designed for a popular low-cost subset of displays on the market.

"This is a small universal breakout board for [BuyDisplay and] Waveshare ePaper displays," Černý writes of the device. "It is compatible with most of the small and medium sized displays (from 1.84" to 7.5") except for the largest ones that require additional controller.

"The boards are compatible with any 3.3V microcontroller that's powerful enough, just make sure it has enough resources especially for the large displays as these need quite a large memory buffer and also that the board is compatible with the library. Tested with ESP8266 and ESP32."

The breakout board, which comes with a bundled though non-soldered 90-degree header, is designed for use with the GxEPD and GxEPD2 Arduino libraries. "The libraries support a lot of displays and it can be difficult to find the correct one (and some displays are only supported by one library and not the other)," Černý notes. "So don't panic if the display doesn't work correctly, you probably just selected a wrong display."

The board is now available on the NiceThings Tindie store, priced at just $3 including header.