For those interested in making their own, some rough costs:

• The EPD and its controller were just under £60 including delivery from the US
• The picture frame was £45
• The WiPy and its expansion was about €36 plus postage in the kickstarter, I don't know how much they are now

If I were to do this again, there's obviously money to be saved by porting the Python to C and using a cheaper micro. Although to be honest, unless I was making a lot of them, I wouldn't bother. Being able to charge a Li-ion battery off USB was quite useful from the expansion board certainly.

A cheaper picture frame would help but going to a proper framing shop meant they let me take a bunch of frames apart until I found one that fitted and so that was worth the cost.

The EPD is just expensive. It would be cheaper to gut a Kindle and use that. I looked at it briefly, looked at the -20V and the +22V and the other weird voltages and thought "nah".

Feel free to leave comments here on how I could have done this with an ESP8622. I have one on the desk to play with next - I won't even disagree with you.