Guess what I found on my mailbox today..... :-) !!!!
Just a mockup for now, It arrived sooner than Amazon's most optimistic estimate, so it turns out I'm not quite ready to solder yet.... I've got to get a serial shell up and running with a few basic file transfer commands, and the UI up and running on the device first - which I'd figured I had a couple more weeks to get done... nice to be wrong about that ;-). I'll start soldering again as soon as I've got a text or two on the device and the UI working nicely to switch between documents and pages, and to load pixmaps of the desired page into a display buffer. Then I'll be ready to connect the e-Ink display and start figuring out how to talk to the driver board and put pixels on the screen... until then, I don't want to risk damaging it -- Waveshare warns everywhere that the little ribbon cable is fragile.... so the less handling the better until everything else is done and the Knoblet is silently singing "If I Only Had A Screen...".
https://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/Qmabku8...VtV/mockup.jpg
EDIT: Link finally works... but the board still doesn't seem to like it as an image tag... too big?.. Oh well.. **... Oh... There we go... it works.