Customer:
How quickly can the Inkplate 5 update pictures from an SD card? I believe it could achieve partial refresh in 0.25s. I’m also looking for the e-ink display vendor’s datasheet to understand how to avoid burn-in by pushing the display to its limit.
Originally submitted via email support on 30 December 2024. Migrated to the forum for community visibility.
Soldered Support:
The datasheet for the Inkplate 5V2’s e-Paper display is available.
Some users have achieved faster partial updates than our standard implementation, but this method does not work reliably on all panels - some experience artefacts when driven that fast. We optimize for both speed and high reliability.
The main bottleneck when drawing partial updates from images on the SD card is loading and decoding the images, not the display update itself. JPEG format is fastest based on our experience. The specific time depends on how much work the JPEG decoder needs to do.
You can also store images in memory from bitmaps using the image converter: GitHub - SolderedElectronics/Soldered-Image-Converter: Soldered Image Converter is a desktop application which converts .png, .jpg, or .bmp format pictures (up to 10 at a time) to C++ compatible Arduino/Dasduino code, which you can use for your Soldered Displays. · GitHub
There are drawImage function overrides that accept bitmaps. 1-bit bitmaps will be the fastest for partialUpdate.
You can use about 30 or so partial updates without a full refresh while retaining ePaper quality. You can also use partialUpdate with the leaveOn flag set to true, which uses more power but leaves the display power supply on, saving time.
Attachment omitted in migration: ED052TC4_Final_ver 2.0.pdf