Customer:
We’re evaluating a low-power display solution for a battery-powered sensor device. Our device uses a Raspberry Pi as the base for USB host, ethernet, and existing IO boards. We’re considering using an Inkplate only as a display+controller unit.
If we use Inkplate in sleep mode, waking it via an IO pin and reading USB input before screen updates, could you estimate the additional delay for this process?
We also need power consumption data for scenarios beyond deep sleep: with frontlight at 50%, with touch (FLICK), and for continuous partial updates (e.g. 5 FPS, MOTION).
Are you planning a combination of FLICK and MOTION features - a greyscale, partial-update e-paper device with fast refresh, touchscreen, and screen lighting? If it’s either/or, we’d prefer MOTION.
We need approximately 6 inch displays, black/white/greyscale or color, very fast refresh, ideally with lighting and touch, with overall power consumption below 1 W. Are there alternative products you’d suggest?
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Originally submitted via email support on 15 September 2025. Migrated to the forum for community visibility.
Soldered Support:
Inkplates are powered by ESP32-WROVER-E and can be used as a display+controller unit with a Raspberry Pi for ethernet, USB host, and OS. This is a common and supported use case using Inkplate peripheral mode.
Peripheral mode is an Arduino sketch that turns Inkplate into a device listening over Serial, allowing you to send commands like “clear the display”, “print text here”, “draw image here” via the USB Serial port. The tradeoff is speed - it’s slower than driving the display natively over the Arduino library. The current peripheral mode sketch in the Arduino library is outdated, but we’re updating it within a few weeks with improved stability, speed, and supported functions.
For waking over USB: Inkplate stays powered when connected via USB (and charges the battery). Instead, use GPIO pins for Software Serial and an interrupt signal over the WAKE pin. We can provide schematics and code examples for this.
Estimated delay after sending interrupt, display initialization, receiving data, and displaying it: ~1 second. Your host Raspberry Pi should wait for a signal from Inkplate confirming it’s awake before sending display data.
Regarding your feature requests: Inkplate MOTION has USB host (via STM32 microcontroller) and ethernet pins, but a Raspberry Pi with Inkplate in peripheral mode will give better results due to complexity. A greyscale, partial-update, fast-refresh e-paper device with touch and lighting is being explored for next year.
Important: partial (fast) update is available only in black and white mode, not greyscale - this applies to all Inkplates.
For your use case, Inkplate 6FLICK is the right choice - it’s quite fast with refreshing compared to other e-paper models. Describe your use case for detailed technical evaluation.
Customer:
Thank you for the detailed answer. Based on your response, we believe the 6FLICK using the updated peripheral mode is the best solution, including deep sleep over GPIO pins and Software Serial. We don’t need specific measurements - we can test and optimize our setup independently.
Implementing everything on the STM32 of MOTION would be too complex compared to using our existing Raspberry Pi implementation with peripheral mode, especially since we need functionalities not easily transferred to a microcontroller, such as file transfer over SFTP.
We currently use a 10-inch TFT, which is our main power consumer. We need to significantly increase battery life while possibly reducing battery capacity (and weight), so we’re considering e-ink as a replacement. We don’t need refresh rates higher than 1 fps and can accept black and white only, making e-ink a better choice than TFT for power consumption.
We weren’t aware that partial/fast update is only available in black and white mode - we’ll keep the GUI simple accordingly.
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Soldered Support:
Great! We can provide a software example and demonstration for wake over GPIO pin with software serial communication.
Your 10-inch TFT likely uses significant power, so Inkplate 6FLICK as a touch-based e-paper replacement should work well.
You can make the GUI more complex in 1-bit mode (black and white only) using dithering - this can be done on the ESP32 itself with images. You can pre-render GUI parts as a background and print new text/images over it using the Image Converter: https://soldered.com/image-converter/