Using Inkplate as HDMI monitor with Raspberry Pi 4B

TECHNICAL SUPPORT Inkplate
1

Customer:

I’m looking for an e-paper display to use with my Raspberry Pi 4B to turn it into a low-energy writing laptop. Most e-paper displays aren’t designed for this use case because they rely on SPI interfaces instead of supporting direct image signals via HDMI or similar connections. I’d like to use an e-paper display as a monitor. Could Inkplate screens work for this purpose, either out-of-the-box or with modifications?

Originally submitted via email support on 5 February 2022. Migrated to the forum for community visibility.

2

Soldered Support:

To send images to Inkplate you can use WiFi or SPI as those are the available communication methods. Other approaches won’t provide sufficient speed. Inkplate may not be fast enough to use as a monitor because we don’t have partialUpdate on grayscale. If you want to pursue this, you’ll need to develop custom code - we only provide basic examples for using Inkplate.