What is it?

EPDiy is a driver board which talks to E-Paper (or EInk) panels, in this case a modern 5.2 inches, fast and modern Eink display.

Why did you make it?

We designed this version with my partner Larry Bank while looking to make a version 7 board with less components. For example using S3 you can have built in USB so why to use an UART chip? (Gone) And using an 8 bit display you actually have 8 IOs left so there is no need to use an IO expander that adds price and complexity to the PCB. The result is a powerful epdiy v7 based controller that is also compatible with Larry’s own FastEPD parallel Eink component. In FastEPD you can fully control the gray matrix so called “waveform”. There is really no waveform or waves, or whatsoever Eink hides from you under corporate secrets. The waveform is just a gray matrix that specifies for a certain temperature, in how many steps to go from GRAY1 to GRAY2

What makes it special?

It’s a really powerful controller that you can use to simulate a phone automatic Landscape /portrait position thanks to the IMU on board. It updates fast. So fast that you might treat it as a normal display if you use monochrome only updates. 16 grays mode so called GC16 will be always a bit slower but still it’s around 300 millis doing a 10 passes update to achieve 16 grays.