Monochrome eInk / ePaper Display with SRAM

2.13″ Monochrome eInk / ePaper Display with SRAM

The design of this product makes it extremely easy to add a monochrome eInk display to a Raspberry Pi or other microcontrollers.

If you’ve ever seen one of the newer e-readers like the Kindle or Nook, you’ve probably noticed their large, static ePaper displays. The image they produce is high-contrast, readable even in daylight, remains visible even when power is completely disconnected, and looks just like printed paper!

Although these displays are excellent, they were never designed as breakout boards specifically for makers—until Adafruit solved this by creating their own!

This breakout features a 2.13″ monochrome display (black and white). It offers high resolution with 250×122 black pixels on a matte white background. Since it is monochrome, updating the display takes much less time—just a couple of seconds instead of the typical 15 seconds.

With most simpler breakouts, by using Arduino or CircuitPython libraries and creating a “frame buffer,” you decide which pixels to activate and then send that data to the display. However, considering that 250 × 122 pixels × 2 colours equals 7.6 KB, this can quickly exceed the memory capacity of many microcontrollers. Even if you had 32 KB of RAM, why would you want to use 8 KB just for that? Adafruit has addressed this by integrating a small SRAM chip on the back of this monochrome display. Since this chip shares the same SPI port used by the eInk display, only one additional pin is required. Most importantly, you no longer need any frame buffering! The SRAM can be used to organize everything you want on the display, and when you’re ready, you can simply transfer the data directly from SRAM to the eInk display. The Adafruit ePaper display library handles all the work—you just interface with it as if it were a standard Adafruit GFX-compatible display.

Since the 3.3V regulator’s Enable pin on the board is accessible, you can power down the SRAM, MicroSD, and display for extremely low power consumption.

Adafruit has also included a MicroSD socket to store everything you want to display, such as images, text files, and more. It can be used with all types of microcontrollers, as it is fully 3V or 5V logic safe.

This product comes assembled and tested, and with a header included. For prototyping or integration into your project, you will need to solder the header.

Technical details

• Dimensions: 61.5 × 39.3 × 5.3 mm / 2.4″ × 1.5″ × 0.2″
• Weight: 13.5 g / 0.5 oz

Adafruit name: 2.13″ Monochrome eInk / ePaper Display with SRAM