--- layout: post title: Building an ePaper badge date: 2025-08-06 19:53 +0200 lang: en categories: tech --- ## Foreword Two weeks before [{% post_url 2025-07-30-awoostria-con-report %}](Awoostria): > Hey, I should build something for my Tinkering Projects Show And Tell panel!" So it begins… The story how I build myself an ePaper badge. ## Requirements Actually, the story begins way earlier, when I still had a physical Raspberry Pi running stuff in my home network, and I wanted to tinker around a bit, and bought myself a Waveshare ePaper. These simple black-and-white displays which maintain their content when the power goes off, which is also inside eBook readers. Some years ago I wanted to build myself a doorsign for the EAST convention, and I wanted to go "as minimal as possible". I wanted to use one of the MSP430 controllers I had laying around, and I wanted to switch motives via MiFare RFID transponders (using an MFRC5xx reader). Work on that development never really took off. So this time, I simply said "fuck it", and threw an ESP32 on the problem, and decided to use [PlatformIO](https://platformio.org/), a toolchain/SDK/library manager. I started with the Arduino framework, which is… pretty wasteful in terms of resources (Flash/RAM/…), but speeds up development significantly. I had a simple ESP32 devboard, and one of the Waveshare modules, and started coding. … But wait, what to I even want to achieve? a dithered image of my fursona ## Resources