Open source InkBoy driver speeds up stock E Ink Game Boy demo

A faster driver for a stock panel

YouTuber Bo Made It has demonstrated an ESP32-S3 powered e-paper board called the InkBoy that runs emulated Game Boy games at 30 frames per second in four shades of grey. The project targets a Waveshare 1.54 inch ESP32-S3 e-paper display whose stock refresh speed is about 300 milliseconds, a rate that is fast for e-paper but mainly practical for static images.

How the panel makes grey levels

Standard black and white E Ink displays hold positively charged black pigment and negatively charged white pigment. Moving those particles with a waveform pattern can keep an image on screen without continuous power, but changing pixels is slow. The display was already producing grey by accident because pigment does not jump instantly from black to white. Bo said that stopping the drive partway through the transition can create grey levels on demand.

The custom driver shortens the waveform and drives pixels individually to reduce image ghosting. Bo first tried dithering for greyscale, but said it looked bad. After additional tweaks, the driver produced four grey levels at 30 frames per second, compared with 3.33 frames per second with the original driver. He said the idea was inspired by another YouTuber who built a custom hardware E Ink Game Boy, while this project instead codes a driver for stock hardware.

Reproduction and risk

Bo published a working version after a month of work, including what he described as some vibe coding for the driver. He also warned that forcing custom waveforms and higher refresh rates on E Ink screens can cause permanent damage, and that long term panel life was not evaluated. His advice is to treat experiments as risky and to use a cheap e-paper screen rather than a modded e-reader.

Sources: The Register