I always wanted a display on my office desk which showed time, tasks, calendar, etc and all I could find were devices with LCD displays. Their design did not appeal to me so I decided to make one myself with an e-paper display. The e-paper displays from good-display are very aesthetically pleasing if designed well and don’t need any power to display an image, which means the controller can update and go to sleep.

The design of paperd.ink is very simple. It uses the esp32 as the main controller with wifi and bluetooth functionality, SD-card slot, GPIO expander (PCF8574), piezo buzzer, RGB LED and 2 capacitive touch buttons. And to program it I have added a CP2104 USB-UART chip which is powered through a solder bridge, so i can cut the trace for lower power consumption when required. The board does not have any sensors but can be added through the GPIO expander.

The front panel contains the RGB LED and the two touch buttons. They are connected using a flat flex cable to the top side of the PCB. It wraps around the e-paper.