Easy e-paper and RP2040 finally come to your Feather with this Adafruit RP2040 Feather Think Ink that’s designed to make it a breeze to add almost any common e-Ink/e-Paper display. Chances are you’ve seen one of those new-fangled ‘e-readers’ like the Kindle or Nook. They have gigantic electronic paper ‘static’ displays – that means the image stays on the display even when power is completely disconnected. The image is also high contrast and very daylight readable. It really does look just like printed paper!
We’ve liked these displays for a long time, and we’ve got Arduino/CircuitPython drivers for tons of the various display chipsets, so wouldn’t an e-paper RP2040 Feather make a ton of sense? Luckily for us, just about every small-medium size eInk display made these days has a standard 24-pin connection. This Feather will add all the power supply support circuitry and level shifting so you can attach your favorite display – we’ve tested it with up to 5.6″ sized 7-color ACeP displays.
Since all ePaper displays with the 24-pin interface require you to buffer the layers of data and write them all out at once over SPI, the RP2040 chip is an excellent driver. It has 264K of internal SRAM so even with the largest displays, there’s plenty of memory to store all the image data plus run your own code. We also put the display on it’s own SPI port so that the Feather’s main SPI port can be used for other peripheral devices.
Feather is the development board specification from Adafruit, and like its namesake, it is thin, light, and lets you fly! We designed Feather to be a new standard for portable microcontroller cores. We have other boards in the Feather family, check’em out here.
At the Feather’s heart is an RP2040 chip, clocked at 133 MHz and at 3.3V logic, the same one used in the Raspberry Pi Pico. This chip has a whopping MB of onboard QSPI FLASH and 264K of RAM! There’s even room left over for a STEMMA QT connector for plug-and-play of I2C devices.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
