Adafruit's RP2040 Feather ThinkInk Aims to Make ePaper Projects Easier Than Ever

Adafruit has launched a new Feather board based around the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller, and this one comes packing a 24-pin interface for common ePaper displays — including shiny new color models.

"Easy e-paper and RP2040 finally come to your Feather with this Adafruit RP2040 Feather ThinkInk that's designed to make it a breeze to add almost any common E Ink/ePaper display," the company writes of its latest launch. " We've liked these displays for a long time, and we've got Arduino/CircuitPython drivers for tons of the various display chipsets, so wouldn't an ePaper RP2040 Feather make a ton of sense?"

Apparently it would, as that's exactly what Adafruit has released. The RP2040 Feather ThinkInk follows, as its name suggests, the popular breadboard-friendly Feather form factor, with the addition of a power supply and level shifter to drive a 24-pin ribbon cable connector at the opposite end of the board to the USB Type-C port.

The board is driven by a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller, giving it two Arm Cortex-M0+ cores running at 133MHz plus 264kB of RAM and a handy programmable input/output (PIO) block. To this, Adafruit has added 8MB of quad-SPI flash storage, a board design which brings out 21 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins including 16 with pulse-width modulation (PWM) and four connected to 12-bit analog to digital converters (ADCs), a 200mA+ lithium-polymer charger, an on-board RGB LED, and a STEMMA QT connector for solder-free expansion.

"[The] support circuitry [supports] common 24-pin ePaper/E Ink displays," the company explains. "These tend to be 1.54" to 7" diagonal and designed for 'smart labels.' No soldering required, simply plug in the display to the FPC connector on the end and load up your code. Not for use with the larger resolution displays on e-Readers like Kindles. Those use a different interface!"

The board is now available on the Adafruit store for $17.50, ribbon cable and display not include. For more information, Liz Clarke has penned a guide to using the board with CircuitPython and the Arduino IDE.