Soldered Electronics Goes Big and Colorful with the New Inkplate 13SPECTRA Smart ePaper Display

Soldered Electronics is back on the crowdfunding circuit with a new entry in the Inkplate family of smart Espressif ESP32-powered ePaper displays, the Inkplate 13SPECTRA — now boasting a 13.3" E Ink Spectra color electrophoretic display panel.

"Inkplate 13SPECTRA brings E Ink Spectra color technology to a massive 13" canvas, delivering 1600×1200 resolution across six vivid colors," Soldered says of the new model. "Whether you are building a smart home dashboard, a digital art frame, or a personal calendar, this development board offers the perfect blend of color, high resolution, and ease of use. Powered by the [Espressif] ESP32-S3 with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, Inkplate 13SPECTRA is fully programmable via Arduino IDE or MicroPython, making it easy to create battery-powered IoT [Internet of Things] ePaper applications that run for months on a single charge."

"Months" may, perhaps, be slightly pushing the device's actual expected runtime: a 3,00mAh battery will keep it ticking over for between 40–50 days on a single charge, the company estimates, based on one screen refresh per hour — with the panel remaining static with the microcontroller in a 14µA deep-sleep mode the rest of the time. Even in the deepest of sleeps, the display remains on and visible: electrophoretic ePaper displays work by moving "ink" around under the screen, and retain an image even when power is removed completely.

In addition to the new E Ink Spectra panel, the Inkplate 13SPECTRA includes an Espressif ESP32-S3-WROOM-2-N32R16V module, giving it single-band 2.4GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5 Low Energy (BLE) connectivity, a 32-bit dual-core Tensilica Xtensa LX7 processor running at up to 240MHz, 16MB of pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM), and 32MB of off-chip flash storage. There's a real-time clock (RTC), with a small chunk of memory that remains active during deep sleep, and a microSD card slot for storage expansion.

Soldered has been releasing ePaper panels for a good while now: the Inkplate family launched back in December 2019 with the original Inkplate 6, which paired recycled Amazon Kindle display panels with an Espressif ESP32 module to create standalone smart screens. Since then the family has expanded to the larger Inkplate 10, with a 9.7" display, the Inkplate 6COLOR, tiny Inkplate 2, and the unusual square-format Inkplate 4 TEMPERA — with the new Inkplate 13SPECTRA being the largest and most colorful yet.

It's not without competition, though. Back in January Seeed Studio released the same 13.3" E Ink Spectra 6 colour ePaper display panel with its own driver board, then — like Soldered — paired it with an Espressif ESP32 microcontroller and housing to create a self-contained battery-powered smart display. Seeed's take on the concept, though, comes out considerably cheaper, at $279.90 before volume discounts.

Soldered, meanwhile, is crowdfunding the Inkplate 13SPECTRA on Crowd Supply now at $309 for a bare display panel and USB Type-C cable or $349 for a pack with 3D-printed enclosure and 3,000mAh battery; all hardware is expected to ship at the end of June, the company says. Hardware design files, meanwhile, will be made available on the Soldered documentation site under the same TAPR Open Hardware License Version 1.0 as previous models, but had not yet been published at the time of writing.