Pimoroni Launches the Inky Frame 7.3", a Sizable Desktop ePaper Display Based on E Ink's Spectra 6

Sheffield-based Pimoroni has announced a new entry in its Inky family of ePaper displays, the Inky Frame 7.3" — powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W and featuring an E Ink Spectra color panel.

"There's a new ePaper screen in town, and it's a biggie," the company boasts of its latest creation. "Inky Frame 7.3" features a super crisp E Ink display with 800×480 pixels of six color goodness. We've added five buttons with LED indicators for interacting with the display, two Qw/ST connectors for plugging in breakouts and a microSD Card slot for storing photos of fond maritime adventures (or whatever floats your boat)."

Pimoroni's Inky family of smart displays are all based around electrophoretic panels — a technology that physically moves layers of "ink" and which requires power only when changing states. Commonly found in eBook readers, electrophoretic ePaper panels deliver a crisp paper-like viewing experience with a very low power draw at the cost of a slow refresh rate and the need for external lighting to be seen.

The new model is based on E Ink's Spectra 6 technology, using a six-color electrophoretic panel with a 7.3" diagonal at a 5:3 aspect ratio and a 20–25 second refresh period. It's linked to a module-mounted Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W development board, featuring the company's RP2350 microcontroller — meaning the choice of any two from a pair of Arm Cortex-M33 or free and open-source Hazard3 RISC-V cores running at up to 150MHz, 520kB of static RAM, and 4MB of quad-SPI flash with execute-in-place support, plus single-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios. There's an additional 8MB of pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM) for bigger projects, a real-time clock (RTC) chip, and a microSD Card slot for image storage.

The new Inky Frame 7.3" is available on the Pimoroni store, with the company's in-house MicroPython variant pre-installed along with a handful of example programs; the frame and desktop-stand legs alone are priced at $99.75, with a bundle adding a 3× AA battery pack and batteries, USB micro-B cable, and 32GB microSD Card available at $110.72.