> Why didn't the makers of this price label just use a little 10 cent off the shelf microcontroller? I doubt price tags are made in sufficient volume to ever get the engineering costs of a custom microcontroller low enough to go below 10 cents...
Are you sure about that? As a hypothetical example, imagine that Walmart is switching all of their stores over to eInk price tags. I found some numbers from 2005 for number of stores and SKUs per store at https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2005/01/06/our-retail...: multiplying out the number of stores with the average number of items carried gives you 500 million price tags.