The RePaper development boards from Pervasive Displays come with a driver board that is powered from 3V and has level shifting on all the I/O pins so it can be used with 5V microcontrollers such as the Arduino. The PCB also has a lot of driver circuitry required to keep the display running smoothly such a temperature sensor, FLASH memory and ZIF socket. All signals are broken out to a 20 male socket header on the left. A 20 pin socket/socket cable is included to make wiring easier and there's also some extra-long header so you can plug these wires into Arduino header or a breadboard.

The displays are available in 1.44", 2" and 2.7" diagonal sizes with resolutions of 128x96, 200x96 and 264x176 pixels. These are intended for use as small dynamic signage in grocery stores since a barcode displayed on it can be scanned by a laser barcode-reader. The display does not require any power to keep the image and will stay 'on' without any power connection for many days before slowly fading. Of course, its also daylight readable and is very high contrast. This makes it excellent for data-logging applications, outdoor displays, or any other ultra-low power usages

RePaper/PDI have provided a suite of example code for Arduino UNO/Leonardo and Mega, as well as a driver compatible with the Adafruit GFX Library. Now you can program this display with the same library as all our TFT LCD and LED matrix displays!

However, please note: the displays are quite large pixel-wise and to dynamically write to the display requires that the display buffers are in SRAM. The buffers for the 2" display are more than 3K. That is more than is available in the Arduino Uno or Leonardo. To use these displays with the Adafruit GFX Library, you will need an Arduino Mega (1280, 2560 or ADK version) for the 1.44" or 2" - the 2.7" is not supported by GFX at this time. No ETA when 2.7" will be completely supported
The largest 2.7" display buffer requirements are too much even for the Mega. It is not possible to use the GFX library with this display.

This guide was first published on Apr 28, 2013. It was last updated on Mar 08, 2024.

This page (Overview) was last updated on Apr 21, 2013.

Text editor powered by tinymce.