I can also be used with Arduino and BeagleBone.

The ePaper display HAT for the Raspberry Pi is called PaPiRus and has its one small screen ranging in size from 1.44-inch to 2.7-inch.

Because the ePaper display does not require any power to keep the image and will stay ‘on’ without any power connection for many days before slowly fading, it will be possible to create very low power Raspberry Pi designs.

The supplier is Pi Supply and they say they are in a 5th generation design so all the wrinkles in the design have been ironed out based on testing and feedback.

The ePaper add-on, which is the brain child of Aaron Shaw, has three interchangeable screen sizes – 1.44-inch diagonal and 128 x 96 pixel resolution, 2.0-inch diagonal and 200 x 96 pixel resolution or 2.7-inch diagonal and 264 x 176 pixel resolution.

The eInk displays come from Pervasive Displays of Taiwan. These can also be sourced separately from Digi-Key.

It has 32Mbit flash memory and a battery-backed clock, which runs off a CR2032 battery (pictured below).

It is a Raspberry Pi standard format HAT (hardware attached on top) and is a rectangular board (65x56mm) that has four mounting holes in the corners that align with the mounting holes on the B+, has a 40W GPIO header and supports the special autoconfiguration system that allows automatic GPIO setup and driver setup.

The automatic configuration is achieved using 2 dedicated pins (ID_SD and ID_SC) on the 40W B+ GPIO header that are reserved for an I2C EEPROM. The EEPROM holds the board manufacturer information, GPIO setup and a thing called a ‘device tree‘ fragment – basically a description of the attached hardware that allows Linux to automatically load the required drivers.

Other elements of the board include a digital temperature sensor and thermal watchdog and the standard Raspberry PI GPIO breakout connector and solder pads.

It has been designed for 3V3 or 5V power supplies and can be used with Arduino or BeagleBone as well as Raspberry Pi.

The development software is all open source and available from the RePaper GitHub page.

There is code for using the ePaper screens with Arduino and BeagleBone.

According to the supplier: