Inky pHAT (ePaper/E Ink®/EPD)

by Pimoroni

A low-energy, high-falutin, E Ink® display for your Raspberry Pi. Now available in a four colour version (red / yellow / 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!

Now in glorious four-colour ✨

Advances in e-paper technology mean we can now use a fancy new four colour display on Inky pHAT. You no longer need to choose between yellow and red, you can have both!

Photos showing the new display are coming soon. Be sure to enter your email in the stock notification box if you'd like to know when the new boards are available to order! ➡

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 20 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. 

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)

Revision History

  • 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.
  • Boards shipped from late 2020 have a higher resolution SSD1608 e-paper screen (250x122 pixels instead of 212x104!).
  • We started shipping the snazzy four colour version of Inky pHAT in August 2025. Our library should autodetect the right drivers for your screen from the information that's stored in the board's EEPROM, but if you're using third party software you might run into issues if you have one of these newer boards.