A Pico W powered E Inkphoto frame/home dashboard/life organiser with a glorious seven-colour display and wireless connectivity.

Inky Frame features our nicest, biggest,seven-colour E Ink display(which can also be found onInky Impression 5.7″), with loads of space for displaying images, text, graphs or interfaces. There arefive buttons with LED indicatorsfor interactingwith the display,two Qw/ST connectorsfor plugging in breakouts and amicroSD card slotfor all-important storage of cat photos. Oh, and a Raspberry Pi Pico W is pre-soldered onboard!

EveryInky Frame comes with a pair of sleek littlemetal legsso you can stand it up on your desk (and aselection of mounting holes if you’d prefer to do something else). There’s also abattery connectorso you can power it without annoying trailing wires, and someneato power saving featuresthat mean you can run it frombatteries for ages.

Available as the frame only or with an accessory kit which includes metal legs, batteries, a battery pack, USB cable, velcro and a 16GB MicroSD card! Select your required option before adding to cart!

Organise Everything!

We’ve designedInky Frame with organisation in mind, here are some things we reckon it would be really great for:

• Checking your calendar and upcoming appointments at a glance!
• Attaching to your office door to display your availability
• Displaying motivational posters, quotes, or images (fungible or otherwise)
• Showing readouts from other wirelessly connected environmental boards (like our new Enviro range?)

Pico W x E Ink

Multi-colour EPD displays use ingenious electrophoresis to pull coloured particles up and down on the display. The coloured particles reflect light, unlike most display types, meaning that they’re visible under bright lights. It takes approximately30 seconds to refresh the display, so they work best in projects that don’t need constant refreshing.

E-paper is also ultra-low power (EPD displays only consume power while they’re refreshing), and the images on the display stick around for a really long time whilst the display is unpowered.

Features

• Raspberry Pi Pico W Aboard
• Dual Arm Cortex M0+ running at up to 133Mhz with 264kB of SRAM
• 2MB of QSPI flash supporting XiP
• Powered and programmable by USB micro-B
• 2.4GHz wireless
• 5.7″ EPD display (600 x 448 pixels)
• E Ink Gallery Palette 4000 ePaper
• ACeP (Advanced Color ePaper) 7-color with black, white, red, green, blue, yellow, orange.
• Ultra wide viewing angle >170
• Dot pitch 0.1915 x 0.1915mm
• 5x tactile buttons with LED indicators
• Two Qw/ST connectors for attaching breakouts
• microSD card slot *
• Dedicated RTC chip (PCF85063A) for deep sleep / wake **
• Fully assembled
• No soldering required.
• C/C++ and MicroPython libraries
• Schematic

Inky Frame Only includes

• Inky Frame 5.7″ (with Pico W Aboard)
• 2 x metal legs

Inky Frame + Accessory Kit includes

• Inky Frame 5.7″ (with Pico W Aboard)
• 2 x metal legs
• 3 x AA battery pack
• 3 x AA batteries
• USB micro B cable
• Velcro square for attaching the battery pack
• microSD card (16GB)

Software

OurC++/MicroPython libraries are packed with nifty software tweaks to get the most out of this screen. You’ll get the best performance using C++, but if you’re a beginner we’d recommend using our batteries-included MicroPython build for ease of getting started.

• Download pirate-brand MicroPython
• PicoGraphics function reference
• Inky Frame MicroPython examples
• Getting Started with Inky Frame

Connecting Breakouts

The Qw/ST connectors on Inky Frame make it super easy to connect up QwiicorSTEMMA QTbreakouts.If your breakout has a QW/ST connector on board, you can plug it straight in with aJST-SH to JST-SH cable.

Breakout Garden breakoutsthat don’t have aQw/ST connector can be connectedusing aJST-SH to JST-SH cableplus aQw/ST to Breakout Garden adaptor. Want to usemultiple breakouts at the same time? Trythis adaptor!

• List of breakoutscurrently compatible with our C++/MicroPython build.

Notes

• Measurements:131.4 x 127.5 mm (L x W)
• * AmicroSD cardcan be addedto cachedata downloaded overwifi or for logging information prior to uploading via wireless. It can also beused to preload assets for your user interface.Certain tasks (like decoding a jpeg or downloading a file) require anSD cardto be present as they need a large working space and wouldn’t be able to fitentirely in RAM.
• We’ve found Pico-flavoured C++/MicroPython is quite fussy about SD cards so if yours doesn’t work, try another or formatting using FAT. The cards in the Accessory Kit, or our32GB or 64GB NOOBScards will work fine.
• ** Inky Frame’s onboard RTC (Real Time Clock) means it can be put into asuper deep sleep modethat only draws about 20uA of power.Inky Framecanturn off the power that drives thePico W and the display completely. It can be woken back up bythe RTC , the front buttons or the external trigger on the extension header. You can also read the RTC to keep track of the time and date, of course!
• On the expansion header is anexternal trigger input. if this is transitioned fromlow to high then Inky Frame will wake up from deep sleep.This lets youadd yourown wake button or circuit or build Inky Frame into a more complicated system. The external trigger is 3.3V max.

About Pico W Aboard

Our new Pico W Aboard productscome with abuilt-in Raspberry Pi Pico W. This means you get all the advantages of anRP2040 microcontroller– a speedy fast dual-core ARM processor, a dynamic, growing ecosystem and a choice of different programming methods to experiment with. Most excitingly though, Pico W haswireless connectivity, so your Pico/RP2040 devices can communicate with each other, and the internet!

Wireless is very new to Pico/RP2040 – be aware that things will move fast and change! Software support (wireless examples, tutorials, CircuitPython support etc)will take a little while to catch up. If you’re an absolute beginner to Pico/RP2040, you might have a better experience with wireless if you wait until everything is a little more settled.