Creating a customizable e-paper dashboard

E-paper displays are seeing increasing adoption as screens in DIY projects that need low power and high contrast. Once confined to e-readers like the Kindle, these screens are now showing up in price tags, transit signs, and hobbyist projects - affordable and interesting as a platform for always-on ambient information displays. In this lightning talk, I want to share what I learned building a dynamic, modular dashboard on an Elecrow 4.2" e-paper display powered by an ESP32-S3 microcontroller.

The core idea is simple: a user-customizable dashboard made up of swappable widgets like weather, time and calendar that anyone can configure or extend. But e-paper is a uniquely constrained medium, and those constraints shape every design decision. The biggest draw is near-zero power consumption when the display is static, making battery-powered deployments genuinely practical. The catch is slow refresh speeds: full panel refreshes can take seconds (!) which rules out anything resembling real-time interaction. Partial refresh features address this issue in newer displays, but for people used to 120Hz screens on their mobile phones, it still feels choppy. Color support is improving rapidly, but budget panels generally support only 2–3 colors with 1–4 bit depth, so you're working within a tight visual palette and often using techniques like dithering to get better visual fidelity.

I'll walk through two distinct approaches I explored, each with real trade-offs. The first is fully embedded firmware, written in a modular style using Arduino/PlatformIO or MicroPython - the latter being particularly interesting for dynamic app loading and discovery without reflashing. This avoids a backend entirely but makes module development harder and raises challenges around HTTPS support and performance when composing data from multiple endpoints. The second is a thin client model, where a backend server handles all rendering using tools like browser rendering and pushes a pre-rendered image to the device. This dramatically simplifies module development and updates, but introduces backend dependency and latency.

I'll close with some ideas for future exploration: more widgets / modules and hybrid approaches that combine remote and local rendering.

• Developing for E-paper screens keeping in mind their unique advantages and challenges

• FOSS Projects in this space

• Discussion on two common approaches for e-paper modules - thin client and fully embedded