MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - M5Paper e-ink device for DIY

stevenaleach · 03-10-2021, 07:06 AM

Still no updated information on the long-awaited and still long awaiting M5Paper... Amazon, meanwhile, has sent me a notification on the Waveshare display, which is shown to have shipped... and is expected to arrive between March 26th and April 16th. Grr... Arrg.

Meanwhile, the mess of wires I've been soldering together here is ready to connect to the display and start testing/coding as soon as it gets here. I gave up on the GPIO expander - it was probably just a bad connection somewhere that multiple rounds of checking and re-soldering failed to cure, but the board kept resetting and glitching on me and acting generally flaky when touched... so the esp32 is handling the rotary encoders directly - which leaves me with *just* enough open pins to connect the Waveshare display and no real room for future expansion after that, but that's fine, and it'll use just a tad less juice since it eliminates that irritating 'active' LED. I've got two rotary encoders and the little memory display for user-interface, the FRAM chip and 32GB SD for storage, and everything seems to coexist and work happily together. My one gripe is that I have to use software SPI for everything (SD, memory display, FRAM and, eventually, the eInk display as well) because if I use hardware SPI for any other device, the memory display quits working... that's a real pain because It doesn't appear I can use software SPI with the standard Arduino/ESP32 SD libraries - I found one that works, https://github.com/nhatuan84/esp32-micro-sdcard, but has some irritating limitations like eight character filenames with three character extensions, but that's not a huge problem.

I thought I was joking when I said I'd probably have the DIY reader finished before the M5Paper finally reaches my mailbox, but it's looking more and more like that will actually be the case -- though I probably won't have it in a frame/case yet since I can't get a head-start on that - I need the screen and its controller in hand so I can measure and ponder and probably wander the shelves of the hardware store and thrift-store a bit (I expect I'll wind up using a picture frame, I don't know yet) .... but I'll probably have actual images and text displayed on a lovely e-ink screen from this thing before the M5Paper gets here.

03-10-2021, 07:06 AM	#80
stevenaleach Enthusiast Posts: 46 Karma: 134116 Join Date: Oct 2013 Device: Android Tablet	Still no updated information on the long-awaited and still long awaiting M5Paper... Amazon, meanwhile, has sent me a notification on the Waveshare display, which is shown to have shipped... and is expected to arrive between March 26th and April 16th. Grr... Arrg. Meanwhile, the mess of wires I've been soldering together here is ready to connect to the display and start testing/coding as soon as it gets here. I gave up on the GPIO expander - it was probably just a bad connection somewhere that multiple rounds of checking and re-soldering failed to cure, but the board kept resetting and glitching on me and acting generally flaky when touched... so the esp32 is handling the rotary encoders directly - which leaves me with just enough open pins to connect the Waveshare display and no real room for future expansion after that, but that's fine, and it'll use just a tad less juice since it eliminates that irritating 'active' LED. I've got two rotary encoders and the little memory display for user-interface, the FRAM chip and 32GB SD for storage, and everything seems to coexist and work happily together. My one gripe is that I have to use software SPI for everything (SD, memory display, FRAM and, eventually, the eInk display as well) because if I use hardware SPI for any other device, the memory display quits working... that's a real pain because It doesn't appear I can use software SPI with the standard Arduino/ESP32 SD libraries - I found one that works, https://github.com/nhatuan84/esp32-micro-sdcard, but has some irritating limitations like eight character filenames with three character extensions, but that's not a huge problem. I thought I was joking when I said I'd probably have the DIY reader finished before the M5Paper finally reaches my mailbox, but it's looking more and more like that will actually be the case -- though I probably won't have it in a frame/case yet since I can't get a head-start on that - I need the screen and its controller in hand so I can measure and ponder and probably wander the shelves of the hardware store and thrift-store a bit (I expect I'll wind up using a picture frame, I don't know yet) .... but I'll probably have actual images and text displayed on a lovely e-ink screen from this thing before the M5Paper gets here.