Inkplate 10 battery life with 10-15 minute update cycle

TECHNICAL SUPPORT Inkplate
1

Customer:

I’m thinking about creating ePaper door signs using an Inkplate 10. If I buy the kit including the battery, what type of battery pack would it be supplied with?

My idea is to update the display about every 10 to 15 minutes and get JSON data from a webserver to update a timetable. In between updates the chip would go into deep sleep. Could you give me an estimate of how often I would have to recharge the battery in this scenario?

Originally submitted via email support on 26 February 2025. Migrated to the forum for community visibility.

2

Soldered Support:

The battery is a 3000mAh Li-Ion battery. The batteries charge automatically while Inkplate is plugged in USB.

You can use the examples in the deep sleep folder of the Inkplate Arduino library, even Simple Deep Sleep to see how to implement deep sleep, and in between sleeps you can refresh the data via WiFi. Make sure to turn off the power indicator LED via the switch on the back to maximally reduce deep sleep current consumption.

It’s hard to approximate the charge but if you also implement refreshing only during the day, you could get about two or three weeks on a single charge.

3

Customer:

I had hoped that the battery would last longer in this scenario but I’m glad you provide a realistic estimate.

Two follow-up questions:

  1. What would you say is the distribution of power consumption between updating the display and doing the communication over WiFi? Does one component draw significantly more current than the other?
  2. If the WiFi is the bottleneck, would the board be expandable with LoRaWan? I guess so because you provide the pin headers?
4

Soldered Support:

It really depends on your use case, but I believe averaged out, WiFi getting data would consume more power because it requires the whole ESP32 to be on while it’s waiting for a reply from the server. So if you could reduce the amount of times it has to get data from the server, that would extend the battery life. Not much you can do about the display updating. Yes, GPIO pins are available and you can use a LoRaWan module in the way you described, if it’s ESP32 compatible.