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Comment by jcun4128 | Hacker News Reader

I am thinking about this (e-paper) but drive it from an ESP (preferably 01) and connect it to a battery where it could last say months/years that would be nice. I was able to do a hardware mod someone posted where you can put it into a self-wake deep sleep if that makes sense for power saving.

Otherwise I currently do desktop notifications/speech text.

I have a basic Kindle too (paper?) And it's amazing the battery life.

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I considered this as well but didn't really want to mess with the hardware. But if you're up for that you can buy the components yourself, or go for something like inkplate [1] which is an E-paper display + ESP microcontroller and battery in one package.

[1] https://inkplate.io/

$100? hmm this price may not be that bad though, considering the display seems to be the most expensive aspect and I'm not finding a similar price/size on Amazon.

One thing I want to learn/address personally is a charging circuit so I'd rather build it myself. Still it is nice to know this is out there ready to go.

Also I have to use these ESP01's I bought haha. The code itself I imagine wouldn't be difficult eg. an http get request firing at whatever interval to your own local/remote endpoint. Would have to see about the ESP driver part to display to eInk.

The price definitely seems great for the size of the display, but it might be worth looking at the Waveshare e-paper displays if you want to do something a bit more DIY.

Yeah those look great. I'm hoping they have a built in driver or whatever and you just send the display data as serial/i2c or something.

Yes they have a peripheral mode with its own commands

https://inkplate.readthedocs.io/en/latest/peripheral-mode.ht...

The Inkplate 10 is being crowdfunded right now for 129$ + shipping.[1] I hope it will be available directly on the website soon as well, as they get shipped from Croatia to the US to be shipped to customers, which would make it unnecessarily expensive to me in Sweden, as I'd have to pay customs duty.

[1]: https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-10

I saw this recently https://m5stack.com/products/m5paper-esp32-development-kit-9...

The company M5 makes incredible gear for this. Their ESP32-Pico Atom chips are all I use.

That's an interesting form factor, almost looks like a phone.

What is special about those particular chips? Haven’t been on the embedded scene in a few years

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