After almost one year on the run, my service to deliver images for epapers and TFT displays finally is starting to get some adoption. The idea was starting at the beginning of 2020 when the epapers and many great projects like EPDiy in hackaday started to be early adopted.
Our ESP32 Firmware does 3 things at the moment and is very easy to set up:
- It connects to cale.es and downloads a Screen bitmap.
- In “Streaming mode” it pushes the pixels to Adafruit GFX buffer and at the end renders it in your Epaper.
- It goes to sleep the amount of minutes you define
But then I needed to research more and a bigger idea was triggered: It was not enough to make an Arduino-esp32 firmware using GxEPD as a library. I wanted to learn more how epapers work and also to get out of Arduino-esp32 and get more into Espressif IDF framework. It was hard, I had some weeks where I achieved nothing, but after about one entire month of coding I finally saw the first small epaper refresh.
Soon there where 5 models more.
Today they are at least 20 models, including color ones, and getting back to EPDiy I added also support for parallel epapers being the new LILYGO T5S 960*540 the first fast paralell eink supported. And then come the touch part. First with Goodisplay FocalTech controller and last week with Chinese L58 controller for this new parallel epaper.
It was a long journey and time taking. But I think it was worth it and I see that at least 20% of the users are having their screens connected and enjoying a very low consumption calendars and photo-frames at home.
Very happy to make this possible and to bring something alternative to the usual arduino-esp32 Firmware. Something that you can hack, that is more understandable, and uses Espressif’s own framework. It might be not very well known for makers but is undoubtedly used in professional industry and it’s a very good alternative, with lots of examples and very well documented.
Next missions are to start making developer tools and examples to introduce uGFX interface design into ESP32 using epapers. There is a long journey ahead and we are very thankful for all the good feedback received so far.
Fasani Corporation 