Best way to drive 10" e-ink display
Matthew Carlson wrote 04/14/2016 at 18:29 • 1 pointSo I'm working on a e-ink picture frame for my parents. The LCD ones you can always tell it's an LCD. E-ink has a much more real printed picture feel to it. My current plans I'm musing over are: buy a used kindle DX ($120-150 on ebay) stuff it into a picture frame, buy a replacement kindle DX screen ($50) and build a driver board (my research so far says the hard part is generating the voltages and figuring out the timing), or buy a dev kit from digikey http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/S2A20CS171/S2A20CS171-ND/5400956 ($200+)
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This person got the kindle 6-inch display to work with his custom driver board:
http://essentialscrap.com/eink/
I've looked at the commercially available driver boards, and most of them are just "load a specially formatted bitmap over serial, then send a command over serial and the picture will be drawn to the display". If that's what you want, then the driver boards should do just fine. I'm looking for much more control, so I've been entertaining the idea of making my own adapter board (with SMD connector and power supplies).
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I'm also trying to power up Kindle DX 9.7" E-link, but currently trying the cheap small 6" first (~10USD)
and I've build a simple driver board (Leonardo with HC595 and the ZIF connector)
the power for E-link is from Ti's EVM and it only cost 10USD.
Still writing the driver code, but I think I might break one beacuse of error waveform.
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Good luck! I am so striving for a simple driver board. Go for it!
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I've been trying a project to drive a cheap $10 6" eink display with just a microcontroller and some extra RAM and other peripherals. Not going well! It's frustrating, I don't recommend doing it this way. If I were to give myself a nice salary, it'd already be over $200. 4 layer PCBs are cheap for prototype projects though.
If you go the hard route (meh), maybe be inspired inspired by these worthy and successful projects:
http://essentialscrap.com/eink/index.html
http://spritesmods.com/?art=einkdisplay
I have some files on GitHub if you want to look:
https://github.com/davidpottingerdesign/eink_test
Good luck!
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woah woah. A $10 10" e-ink panel? I have a feeling it's alibaba but where did you score something that cheap
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Oops, I mean 6".
http://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&SearchText=ED060SC4
I forget which one of these I got. Maybe $15.
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Hmmmm it does sounds like the compromise is certainly the easiest route to go. On the other hand, trying some more serious SMD work does sounds tempting. Thank you @borazslo for posting those projects. I took a look through them but I need to talk to the project creators. Maybe my version can take in video output. The other two seem to be focused on generating the waveforms and the voltages necessarily not the control signals.
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I vote for the driver board. That one is the most difficult solution, but an open e-ink board would be a great help for many-many-many DIY hackers. So, please do it!
There are others trying the same thing:
https://hackaday.io/project/10161-6-inch-pi-e-ink-display
https://hackaday.io/project/7443-e-ink-display-adapter
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Sounds like the used kindle is a good compromise between price and difficulty :)
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