Inkplate 6 is an easy-to-use, open hardware, ESP32-powered e-paper display with on-board Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Its all-in-one design and support for both Arduino IDE and MicroPython make Inkplate 6 by far the easiest way to bring your e-paper ideas to life.

As you will shortly notice, we are quite fond of e-paper displays. But they’ve been a somewhat frustrating obsession for us. Until recently, this amazing technology was pretty thin on the ground. These days, of course, you can pick yourself up an e-book reader for as little as $70. But what about us makers!? There are a few DIY options on the market now, so things are better than they used to be. But when we tried to work with them, we felt like we are using half-finished products. With no other options, we we decided to develop our own.

Unfortunately, recycled e-paper displays do not come with very good documentation. It took us around seven months of active development to decipher the communication protocol of the Kindle’s display to the point where we could make Inkplate 6 into a proper, easy-to-use device with a screen that looks natural—that, we believe, looks beautiful.

We have experimented with other e-paper screens: different sized screens, touch-sensitive screens, backlit screens, flexible screens… So many screens! (We’ll show you a few of them during the campaign.) If Inkplate 6 is successful, we fully intend to develop additional Inkplate models.

We welcome your feedback, and we are sincerely looking forward to the rest of this journey. We believe Inkplate 6 represents a new state-of-the-art for maker-friendly e-paper devices. Help us bring it to the world…and then help us make it even better!