🎉  Happy 13th Birthday Raspberry Pi!   🎂   1,000+ deals in store!   🥳
🎉  Happy 13th Birthday Raspberry Pi!   🎂   1,000+ deals in store!   🥳

Inky Frame 7.3" (Pico 2 W Aboard)

by Pimoroni

An extra-large Pico 2 W powered E Ink® photo frame / home dashboard / life organiser with glorious seven colour display and wireless connectivity.

There's a new ePaper screen in town, and it's a biggie! Inky Frame 7.3" features a super crisp E Ink display with 800 x 480 pixels of seven colour goodness. We've added five buttons with LED indicators for interacting with the display, two Qw/ST connectors for plugging in breakouts and a micro SD card slot for storing photos of fond maritime adventures (or whatever floats your boat).

Every Inky Frame comes with a pair of sleek little metal legs so you can stand it up on your desk (and a selection of mounting holes if you'd prefer to do something else). There's also a battery connector so you can power it without annoying trailing wires, and some neato power saving features that mean you can run it from batteries for ages.

Here are some things we reckon this mahoosive Inky would be great for:

💡 An ultra readable, low power consumption home automation dashboard

🖼️ Displaying stylised photos, pop art images or favourite comic panels.

📊 Showing cute graphs and readouts from local or wirelessly connected sensors

👀 Displaying fascinating data from online APIs.

What's new? 😎

As of mid-December 2024, Inky Frame is now Pico 2 W Aboard! Pico 2 W and it's souped-up RP2350 chip bring some exciting improvements to Inky Frame - including a higher core clock speed, double the on-chip SRAM and double the on-board flash memory. The RAM upgrade in particular should help a bunch when working with this big display and with making requests from online APIs.

Pico 2 W x E Ink®

Multi-colour EPD displays 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 easily visible under bright lights.

E-paper is also ultra low power. It only consumes power whilst refreshing and the images on the display stick around for a really long time whilst the display is unpowered. This means these displays are perfect for powering from battery!

⚠ It takes approximately 40 seconds to refresh this display, so it will work best in projects that don't need constant refreshing.

Features

  • Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W Aboard
    • Dual Arm Cortex M33 running at up to 150MHz with 520KB of SRAM
    • 4MB of QSPI flash supporting XiP
    • Powered and programmable by USB micro-B
    • 2.4GHz wireless
  • 7.3" EPD display (800 x 480 pixels)
    • E Ink Gallery Palette® ePaper
    • ACeP (Advanced Color ePaper) 7-color with black, white, red, green, blue, yellow, orange.
    • Ultra wide viewing angles
    • Ultra low power consumption
    • Dot pitch – 0.2 x 0.2mm
  • 5 x tactile buttons with LED indicators
  • Two Qw/ST connectors for attaching breakouts
  • microSD card slot *
  • 8MB PSRAM
  • Dedicated RTC chip (PCF85063A) for deep sleep / wake **
  • Fully assembled
  • No soldering required.
  • Programmable with C/C++ or MicroPython

Inky Frame Only includes

  • Inky Frame 7.3" (with Pico 2 W Aboard)
  • 2 x metal legs

Inky Frame + Accessory Kit includes

  • Inky Frame 7.3" (with Pico 2 W Aboard)
  • 2 x metal legs
  • 3 x AA battery pack
  • 3 x AA batteries
  • USB micro B cable
  • Velcro square for attaching battery pack
  • microSD card

Getting Started

To make it easy to get started, Inky Frame ships pre-loaded with pirate brand MicroPython and some fun examples that use the wireless capabilities of the Pico 2 W to display interesting things.

To enable Inky Frame to connect to the internet, you'll need to save a file called secrets.py to the Pico 2 W using Thonny. It should contain the following lines:

WIFI_SSID = "your_ssid_goes_here"
WIFI_PASSWORD = "your_password_goes_here"

To return to the launcher, hold down buttons A and E and tap reset.

You can find more examples on Github:

Connecting Breakouts

The Qw/ST connectors on Inky Frame make it super easy to connect up Qwiic or STEMMA QT breakouts. If your breakout has a QW/ST connector on board, you can plug it straight in with a JST-SH to JST-SH cable.

Breakout Garden breakouts that don't have a Qw/ST connector can be connected using a JST-SH to JST-SH cable plus a Qw/ST to Breakout Garden adaptor. Want to use >2 breakouts at the same time? Try this adaptor!

Notes

  • Measurements: 176.20mm x 139.20 mm (L x W)
  • Overall display dimensions: 170.2 x 111.2mm (W x H)
  • Usable area dimensions: 160 x 96 mm (W x H)
  • These seven colour ePaper displays work best when refreshed at an ambient room temperature - between 15 and 35°. If the screen is cold you might find that the colours are less vibrant or the display is much darker than it should be.
  • Due to the size of this panel and the esoteric practices surrounding suspending coloured particles in goo, there is some expected variation in colour density towards the corners. This is most noticeable when displaying block colours - green and orange in particular become less saturated towards the corners of the panel. We've noticed that the corners can also sometimes have a pink tinge when displaying full white (especially when the screen is cold).
  • * A micro SD card can be added to cache data downloaded over wifi or for logging information prior to uploading via wireless. It can also be used to preload assets for your user interface. Certain tasks (like decoding a jpeg or downloading a file) require an SD card to be present as they need a large working space and wouldn't be able to fit entirely in RAM.
  • We've found Pico flavoured C++/MicroPython is quite fussy about SD cards so if yours doesn't work, try another or formatting using FAT. The cards in the Accessory Kit, or our 32GB or 64GB cards will work fine.
  • ** Inky Frame's onboard RTC (Real Time Clock) means it can be put into a super deep sleep mode that only draws about 20uA of power. Inky Frame can turn off the power that drives the Pico W and the display completely. It can be woken back up by the RTC , the front buttons or the external trigger on the extension header. You can also read the RTC to keep track of the time and date, of course!
  • On the expansion header is an external trigger input. if this is transitioned from low to high then Inky Frame will wake up from deep sleep. This lets you add your own wake button or circuit or build Inky Frame into a more complicated system. The external trigger is 3.3V max.
  • 'Shipping image' by donvictorio, via Shutterstock.

Resources

About RP2350

The RP2350 chip is the Double Quarter Pounder & Fries to the RP2040's Double Cheeseburger and can have one or more RISC-V burgers instead of either of the M33 ARMs, to stretch the metaphor.

In addition to the modern M33 ARM cores, there are sides of: more PIO capability, a variety of low power states for sipping electrons, a whole security system and some sprinklings of specialist digital video circuits to offload DVI/HDMI output.

You can expect a tasty boost in performance - our "real world" MicroPython tests are running up to 2x faster compared to RP2040, and floating point number crunching in C/C++ is up to 20x faster. The extra on-chip RAM will make a big difference when performing memory intensive operations (such as working with higher resolution displays) and even more can be added thanks to external PSRAM support.

RP2350 comes in two flavours - A (standard) and B (all the pins). The B chip has a stonking 48 usable GPIO pins, including 8 ADCs and 24 PWMs, and features on some of our new products. 

Click here to view all things RP2350!