Inky pHAT (ePaper/eInk/EPD)

by Pimoroni

A low-energy, high-falutin, electronic paper (ePaper / eInk / EPD) display for your Pi, in three different colour schemes: red/black/white, yellow/black/white, and black/white!

Inky pHAT's beautiful, high contrast display is ideal for displaying simple graphics and crisply-rendered text and, because it's like paper, it's readable in bright sunlight. You could use Inky pHAT as a cute little clock, display tweets on it, the weather, news headlines, sports scores, and more. It's also ideal for graphing data from remote sensors, CPU load or temperature, or stock prices.

Our Getting Started with Inky pHAT tutorial is a great starting point for getting acquainted with the joys of e-paper! 

Features

Multi-colour EPD displays, like the ones on Inky pHAT, use ingenious electrophoresis to pull coloured particles up and down on the display. The coloured particles reflect light, unlike most display types, meaning that they're visible under bright lights. It takes approximately 15 seconds to refresh the display, with a typical 8mA current draw during refreshes. The black/white display can be refreshed much more quickly, in just a second or two.

Everything comes fully-assembled, and there's no soldering required! The display is securely stuck down to the Inky pHAT PCB and connected via a ribbon cable. Just pop Inky pHAT on your Pi and run our installer to get everything set up!

It'll work with any 40-pin version of the Pi, including Pi Zero and Pi Zero W.

Software

Our Python library takes the stress out of displaying text and images on Inky pHAT, and our examples include a cute clock and weather display. 

We started rolling out a higher resolution SSD1608 e-paper screen on Inky pHAT from late 2020 (250x122 pixels instead of 212x104!).  Our library should autodetect the right drivers for your screen, but you might run into problems using third party software to drive the display if you have one of these newer boards. 

Our current Inky library does not support the original (V1) Inky pHAT. If you have one of these boards you should use the original Inky pHAT Python library.

Notes

  • Overall dimensions: 65x30x8.5mm (WxHxD, depth includes header and display)
  • Display usable area dimensions: 48.5x23.8mm (WxH), 2.13" diagonal
  • PCB and screen dimensions (PNG)