The next step is taking some monitor input and getting it to display on the ePaper Display.

I'm going with VGA - I'll try to use a MST9883 (that's what was on eBay). The canonical part is the Analog Devices AD9883; essentially it will save a lot of steps with this project. It takes RGB input and recovers a pixel clock from HSync and dumps all of the pixel colors in parallel.

Also, there is an I²C component - EDID on VGA and settings on the MST9883. I'm going to just use a microcontroller to do these.

Add up memory plus the MST9883 plus a couple SPI busses plus the ePD signals and you're looking at a minimum of 68 to 83 I/Os on the FPGA/BIG_CPLD (depending on color depth), probably 71 minimum to get 4-bit 'color'.

Any suggestions on FPGAs here? I'm reasonably agnostic, I just want something reasonable with plenty of LEs.