Excellent Product
For Inkster - E-paper development board
First of all: you won't regret buying this product :-). It is well made and comes really well packed and supported by a community of enthusiasts for e-paper displays.
Why would you want this board anyway? Well, you could go for waveshare and gooddisplay boards and displays. You would then find out that the displays are very expensive and you will find e-ink displays much cheaper ($ 10 for 6inch and $25 for 9.7 inch). However, the e-ink displays (as used in amazon kindle or tolino etc.) cannot be driven by waveshare driver boards. Inkplate boards seem like a nice option but honestly, they are pricey as well.
This is the point where epdiy presents as a nice solution. The problem: you cannot buy these boards anywhere. In order to get one, you will have to let them be made - sounds easy, right? At least I thought so. But actually, it isn't (I needed like a week to realise so). Even though pcb assembly itself is quite cheap, many of the components are not available for the epdiy v5 boards and the v6 needs a texas instruments chip that is unavailable for countless weeks. Yes, jlcpcb offers custom stock of components but for that you would have to buy 1500 of them even though you might only need 10. So that's not a solution as well.
So with all that said there is only one way left - buy this board from Martin or solder it yourself (as he way so nice to release the gerber files to get the pcb manufactured and use the bill of material to collect the components). Both options have their pros and cons. For both ways, it should be appreciated that Martin not only 'tuned' the board with a nice rgb led and switches but also found and used components that seem slightly cheaper and better available than the v5 epdiy boards.
If you decide to solder it yourself you might get it to work but a) many components have minimum order quantities so you will end up with a lot of unused (still having to be paid for) components or you will have to make like 10 in a row which is only useful if you can use them all and b) you will probably have learning costs and components that you will destroy trying (at least if you're not an expert on smd soldering). And of course you have to calculate the time to make it, at least if you don't consider the soldering personal leisure time.
If you buy one of the boards here, you will have a really very well made board and much less worries. The github repository contains a nice example for platformio which will help you get started really quick if you have some experience. And most importantly, you will support the inventor of this board (at least the flavor of it) and appreciate all the time he spent on it.
And I almost forgot, the stl files for the case are very useful and well designed as well.
When you take your time to read more about how this hardware and software works, you will on top find a very intelligent group of people who share the same enthusiasm for the e-ink displays.
So as i said in the beginning: if you buy this board, you won't regret it!
Response from NiceThings | March 17, 2022
Wow, thank you so much for the kind words! :)
