Zerowriter Creator Adam Wilk Unveils the Zerowriter Pi Bright Display ePaper HAT for Raspberry Pi

Adam Wilk, creator of the Zerowriter family of distraction-free typing devices, has announced the impending launch of a new gadget designed to make it easier to build your own ePaper gadgets with a Raspberry Pi: the Zerowriter Pi Bright Display.

"Zerowriter Pi Bright Display brings a six-inch, fast ePaper screen with user-controllable front lighting to your Raspberry Pi projects," Wilk writes of the device. "It works with Linux command line applications natively: no fuss or driver complications. Plug it in, run the driver, and enjoy responsive, 12 FPS [Frames Per Second] ePaper. The rest is up to you."

The Zerowriter Pi Bright Display is effectively the same as found in Wilk's Zerowriter Ink, a slab-format "writerdeck" designed to provide distraction-free typing with a single-purpose application running on an Espressif ESP32 microcontroller. That, in turn, built on the original ZeroWriter, back when it was still written with a captial "W," which took inspiration from Penk Chen's Penkēsu, or ペンケース, placing an ePaper display into a 3D-printed clamshell housing with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W single-board computer and a compact mechanical keyboard.

"Zerowriter Pi Bright Display brings fast ePaper to any Raspberry Pi project without any extra work," Wilk explains of the reason for the add-on's design. "Plug in your Pi to our HAT [Hardware Attached on Top], and you instantly will have output to the six-inch ePaper display. You can then focus on everything else: building cool software, designing the enclosure, etc. Now you can easily build a distraction-free writing machine that can use any of your favorite command-line based word processors or editors: VIM, Emacs, Wordgrinder, or even nano. You could also create your own personal ePaper terminal for coding or development. You could level up your dashboard projects. You could create an [ePaper] based emulator. You could implement new panels, bigger displays, and more with our open source back end code."

The six-inch display itself is driven from a HAT add-on built for the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and with support for the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, though electrically compatible with any Raspberry Pi model with a 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header — with support already included for a nine-inch ePaper display variant, Wilk notes. There's support for unlit or front-lit displays, integrated power switch, USB Type-C power connector, and an open source firmware that exposes the display as a standard framebuffer device at speeds of up to 12 frames per second.

Interested parties are invited to sign up on the project's Crowd Supply page to be notified when the crowdfunding campaign goes live; Wilk has pledged to release design files, 3D print files, a bill of material, "and more" under a yet-to-be-determined permissive open-hardware license once all orders have been fulfilled.