Customer:
I’m working on a hobbyist project to make my own writing deck. I’ve tried Waveshare screens but their partial refresh code isn’t reliable. Of your e-ink displays, which would work best as a monitor for a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W? I’d like to operate it from terminal and write within nano. Do you have any products that would work for this?
Originally submitted via email support on 18 March 2025. Migrated to the forum for community visibility.
Soldered Support:
For your use case, our devices can’t be directly used as a monitor in a simple sense, but here are two approaches:
Option A: Develop a driver on the computer side that converts a nano window into a black and white bitmap and sends it to Inkplate via SPI (UART wouldn’t be fast enough). The Inkplate sketch would receive each frame over SPI, convert it into a displayable bitmap, and display it with partialUpdate. This would essentially be a “SPI e-paper monitor for a single window” and could be a cool project.
Option B: The Raspberry Pi sends text and key inputs (backspace, enter) from your keyboard to Inkplate over Serial, while Inkplate handles displaying and drawing text, plus special key inputs. This would require implementing much more logic on the ESP32 side.
From our devices, the fastest-updating is the Inkplate 6 MOTION, which is STM32 based and has pins out for a USB Host: Inkplate 6MOTION - High-Speed E-Paper With Motion Sensors – Soldered Electronics
The fastest-updating from the ESP32 range is currently the Inkplate 6 FLICK, which also has a touchscreen and backlight: Inkplate 6FLICK - Interactive Touchscreen E-Paper Display – Soldered Electronics
Inkplate as a whole is an ESP32 development board with an e-Paper and powerful graphics library. It can technically do this, but it requires implementation. An emulated nano from Raspberry Pi would be a fantastic idea for examples we could work on in the future.