Ooh, that looks nice! Great work. 🏅
Hey, I’m planning on getting one of these displays to try and make my own dashboard. Do you mind sharing why these displays shouldn’t be updated so often?
What would be the damage in the long run?
You will see ghosting, smearing and degraded colors. A number of users reported issues here in the forums. I do note that I haven’t found any official figures - the datasheets of these displays don’t seem publicly available.
Anyhow, a refresh cycle takes 40 seconds of wild flashing, so you don’t want to update too often anyhow. That is the reason why I like the B&W displays, they update much faster.
Thanks. I understand next to nothing when it comes to e-ink, but is the refreshing cycle referring to refresh of the whole display? For example, would it be a problem to incrementally refresh only parts of the image?
I planned to make this a clock/thermo dashboard, but if my clock updates every 30 minutes, I wouldn’t have much need from it.
The color displays always need a full refresh of everything. Most B&W displays have partial refresh, which is much faster (but still slower than a normal display). I use a Pimoroni Badger2040W (which is B&W) for a clock. It updates fine once a minute:
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Okay, thanks. So I guess there is no practical way I can use the color displays for a clock or something that needs to be refreshed under 15 minutes.
Sorry if I’m asking for too much here but can you recommend me 7"ish (size can be either larger or smaller) B&W display that has similar connectivity and capabilities like the Inky impression? I couldn’t find pimoroni offering something like that.
It seems that B&W is limited to small and medium-sized displays. I could not find anything with more than 400x300 pixels, like the Inky wHat. One exception: Elecrow has a 272x792 B&W display (with an ESP32-S3). You can see it here: Elecrow CrowPanel E-Paper Display, 5.79 Zoll, 272x792 Auflösung, ESP32-S3, SPI, ... - kaufen bei BerryBase.
Internally, it uses two driver-chips each driving half of the display (which is with some advanced math 272x396 each, which is again very near to 300x400). So it seems that there is some sort of limit here.
Does it have to be an e-ink? With my clock above I really had to fight hard to get it to run a decent time on batteries. If you are not limited by power (i.e. if you can use a wall plug), then you have much more choices for displays.
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