The use of e-paper price tags has been on the rise in recent times, and for good reason too. They have great readability, consume extremely less power, can operate efficiently in a wide temperature range (large stores have chill zones for safekeeping of meat, fish, raw veg, and such), and allow for centralized operations that makes it less manual labor intensive and so on. So far so good but some ingenious thinking seems to have devised a new way to put such e-paper price tags to use, that of using several of these as grid displays.

As Hackaday reported, DIY enthusiast Aaron Christophel hit upon the idea of creating grid displays using no less than 300 e-paper displays arranged in a 20 x 15 layout. E-paper displays are in fact great for such projects given their lightweight attribute as well as their ability to last a long time on a single charge. Plus, their ability to update wirelessly is another positive aspect of the e-paper displays. Aaron, meanwhile, resorted to pasting Velcro on a plywood board for holding the individual e-paper displays.

For firmware, Aaron resorted to reverse engineering a previous work of Dmitry Grinberg wherein he used a 3D printed pogo pin programming jig to flash to scores of tags. Aaron also isn’t stopping at this and has said he is working on another project where he intends to use the displays sans their enclosure and attached to a 3D printed grid frame. There might still be several challenges to the above process – each of the displays will be losing out on their battery and antenna – though Aaron intends to work around this by connecting the displays to a single power source as well as connecting the displays to an ESP32 via ISP or UART.

While we await that, here is a video depicting Aaron’s present work.

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