I recently researched USB connected information displays but I am interested in e-Ink. I want

- USB power + data

- Open interface so I can drive it from my own software on the host (but not like a traditional monitor, I imagine more uploading pre-rendered bitmaps)

- Image retention when powered off

- High resolution paper like appearance

- Between A5 and A4 in size

- At least black, red and yellow as colors

- Buttons or a way to connect buttons would be a bonus

If anyone has a tip, I'd be grateful.

>>Between A5 and A4 in size

Very expensive.

For $59 you can get M5PaperS3 ESP32S3 Development Kit (960x540, 4.7" eInk Display, 235 ppi)

https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5papers3-esp32s3-developm...

Or you can get:

https://lilygo.cc/products/t5-e-paper-s3-pro

But these have 4.7 inch display.

You can probably hack and repurpose old e-readers if you can be bothered with the technical pain.

Color is the hardest thing on your list. I think something that meets most other requirements is the Inkplate 10, which I’ve been using as an apartment status display for a few years now. It’s ESP32 based and I have it grabbing an image from Home Assistant every minute, which it works great for. Black and white only though.

Seeed Studio is pumping out somewhat smaller sized e-ink with relatively open hardware for Trminal use

https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/09/06/reterminal-e1001-e10...

People have had this dream for probably close to 20 years (since Kindle v1).

And yet it still seems out of reach beyond going with a full hdmi eink display.

The closest I have found is the M5Stack 4.7” eink display with built in esp32 and lipo battery.

So a few years ago I hacked up this sort of thing.

I bought a generic epaper display from aliexpress, a 5.8 inch 648x480 one that could do white/black/red with an SPI interface, then I wired that to an RP2040 board, then wrote a bit of circuitpython firmware for that which could receive commands over USB and draw stuff on the display.

I got as far as being able to send images to it, and writing a little host program on my PC that would do a partial screen update on a clock display and CPU/GPU temperatures once a minute, and draw a Mandelbrot set in the remaining space, with a full screen refresh every 15 minutes because it needed it, and a several minute “exercise” routine that would take every pixel from white to black to red and back to white at midnight, to improve screen appearance longer term.

And then I got bored/annoyed with it as the refresh was so slow (~30s for a red update) and the rp2040 needed me to manually press its reset button after every windows boot or the usb device wasn’t recognised. I thought about rewriting the firmware in C in case it was circuitpython that was flakey … but lost the impetus.