vroland

epdiy

C2021–2025

vroland / epdiy

epdiy

EPDiy is a driver board for affordable e-Paper (or E-ink) displays.

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8Distinct people

9Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

2KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

EPDiy is a driver board for affordable e-Paper (or E-ink) displays.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year9 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2021-01-17 22:35:10 UTC to 2025-04-02 17:52:29 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Submissions	Comments
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	0	3
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	0	3
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1	0
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1

What Hacker News says

9 sources

nyrikki·Apr 2, 2025

No connection to this project, but I also have a couple sitting around for "some day" The biggest issue is that most of the adapter boards that are often available are not that great, so having a board built from EDPiy is an option. https://github.com/vroland/epdiy For the kindles that have wifi, custom firmware is probably easier?

In Train and Weather Tracker with Raspberry Pi and E-Ink

fanf2·Oct 27, 2024Submission

EPDiy: An ESP32-based driver board for e-Paper / E-ink displays

3 points · Open discussion

alexose·Apr 24, 2023

I think the world of homebrow eInk devices is set to take off. The problem right now is that while the screens have come down in price considerably, the driver hardware remains expensive and proprietary. If you want to build something for cheap, you'll be designing the PCB from scratch (as this author did). Enter EPDIY, which brings wide support to a variety of screens using commodity hardware. It's still under development, but it's looking really promising: https://github.com/vroland/epdiy

In A WiFi color eInk picture frame

sho_hn·Mar 21, 2023

"Driver" is in all honesty a bit overly braggy! Technically it's a driver, but in practice I'm just talking over a chip via SPI. It's weird and quirky SPI - I think this chip originally just had an I80 interface (Intel 8080 protocol) and then they added a SPI frontend that internally translates to I80. That means you have to SPI with I80-ish chip select semantics etc. which is not what the SPI APIs in the ESP-IDF or Arduino frameworks do by default (leading to things not working unexpectedly), so I had to "bit-bang" CS. Aside from quirks like this it was pretty simple and just following the datasheet to stream the right commands and data. One thing that made it functionally worth it (aside from the hacking fun and learning) is that E-ink panels perform best if run at a particular drive voltage ('VCOM') that is determined at manufacturing

Read the rest

time and attached as a little sticker to the flex cabling sticking out of the unit. I stumbled upon this while reading various data sheets, and as a result my custom code will set the correct voltage, driven by config. If I had used a random lib I probably wouldn't have encountered this. That said, I've found there's very cool projects out there that go a level deeper. Instead of using an EPD controller like the IT8951 as a convenience, this project runs E-ink panels directly off a MCU by implementing the waveforms directly: https://github.com/vroland/epdiy After reading the panel datasheets I find that approach quite interesting, and am considering doing fresh Rust impl of that as well. The Spotify project looks cool! I dig the dithering style. Would like to try a multi-color panel as well.

In Typst, a new markup-based typesetting system, is now open source

alexose·Feb 28, 2023

Shoutout to the EPDIY project, which supports the ED133UT2 and is planning to support the 10.3" ES108FC1 in a future revision! https://github.com/vroland/epdiy

In The E-Ink Badge

russh·Jun 28, 2022

https://github.com/vroland/epdiy/tree/master/src/epd_driver/...

In The Modos Paper Monitor

iampivot·Jul 1, 2021

According to this page, those displays are not the best; https://github.com/vroland/epdiy

In Show HN: A 13.3" battery-powered e-paper picture frame to display digital art

kekub·May 30, 2021

If you just need the display: AliExpress. If you want to drive it, I would recommend EPDIY (https://github.com/vroland/epdiy).

In Show HN: Paperd.ink – Open-source e-paper development board

userbinator·Jan 17, 2021

http://essentialscrap.com/eink/ Those are 6" 800x600 displays for ~$20-30. Edit: here's a whole list of related models: https://github.com/vroland/epdiy

In E Ink has developed a 2nd generation Advanced Color E-Paper