Dear backers,

We very much appreciate the patience of everyone who’s been waiting for their brand new Inkplates! It has been a long summer with shortages, and it seems like our projection that we would need a lot of time to ship Inkplate 6COLOR was correct. We have some good news ahead, though.

Inkplate 6COLOR production

Inkplate boards are now fully produced. Check out some pictures below - we have 530 pieces (or 265 panels, each consisting of 2 boards) fully assembled now. The remaining work to do is to add the e-paper panels while running the test code. If the tests go well, we’ll glue the panel to the PCB and pack everything nicely. And that’s it!

You might notice that there’s no MCP23017 from Microchip anymore on the Inkplate boards. For Inkplate 6COLOR, MCP chip was even in the campaign text and video, but now it has been replaced with PCAL6416A from NXP. Microchip lead times were simply terrible and we would never be able to deliver the product. We even paid 11x the price for this chip in some batches, just to be able to deliver some boards (of other Inkplates) on time. NXP IO expander does just the same thing, and we managed to get few reels; so all other Inkplates are also changing to this one.

It’s (almost) shipping time!

We should be ready to ship to Mouser by mid-September. Given that, we would like to ask that you please check your shipping address on Crowd Supply. (It’s been a while since the campaign…) If you need to update your shipping address, you can do so through your Crowd Supply account settings.

Please contact Crowd Supply Support with any shipping questions or concerns. We are also available for all other questions.

Thank you,
Soldered team