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HomeIoTNiceThings' Inkster Drives ePaper Shows with an ESP32 — and Boasts a...

NiceThings’ Inkster Drives ePaper Shows with an ESP32 — and Boasts a Few Bonus Options, Too

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Czechia-based NiceThings has launched an ESP32-based driver board for ePaper shows, primarily based on the EPDiy challenge however with some helpful tweaks — together with a extra compact format, three buttons, a thermistor, and a voltage divider for battery monitoring.

” I (arguably) helped design the V5 [EPdiy] board,” NiceThings’ founder Martin Černý explains, “and later made Inkster, which is my very own taste of the board with some tweaks. It’s tremendous compact and though this board is common, it is tailor-made for some shows in a method that they wrap across the board and make very compact initiatives doable.”

Pushed by an Espressif ESP32-WROVER-B module, the board helps 33- and 34-pin ePaper shows with as much as 16 ranges of grey, although its extra compact design ditches the 39- and 40-pin connectors discovered on the EPDiy boards that impressed it. There are pads for as much as three switches, a TP4056 charging circuit plus pads for a lithium-polymer battery, a voltage divider for battery monitoring, and a thermistor for temperature measurement.

A key promoting level of the board is a low deep-sleep present of simply 14µA — which, mixed with the truth that ePaper shows retain no matter’s on them even when energy is totally eliminated, will enable for some long-lived initiatives. A micro-USB connector provides information and energy connectivity, with a CH340 chip for serial communication. Lastly, an RGB LED is included for standing notifications.

“I wished to make reward photograph frames for Christmas for my members of the family,” mcer12 writes. “The photograph frames had been presupposed to obtain random picture from remotely hosted photograph library on daily basis. I designed my very own board and was capable of do exactly that and the reactions from my household had been overwhelming. However in fact that’s one use case.”

The work builds on an identical “common” ePaper show driver launched by NiceThings final yr, which supplied a compact footprint however lacked assist for bigger ePaper shows — and had no on-board microcontroller, making it unsuitable for standalone initiatives with no host board.

A schematic, invoice of supplies, and Gerbers for the board have been revealed to GitHub underneath the reciprocal GNU Normal Public License 3; boards are in the stores on the NiceThings Tindie retailer at $69. A 3D-printable case for the Inkster board and show in 6″ or 9″ variants is obtainable on Thingiverse underneath the permissive Inventive Commons Attribution license.

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