ThingPulse 2.9" ESPaper Lite Kit, ESP8266 WiFi ePaper Display

A great kit. A lot of fun to setup, even more fun to hack the code... and a practical little IOT weather station. If you have never used a embedded IDE (like Arduino) then this could be challenging. Installing USB drivers was a pain too... but none of that is the fault of this kit, it’s just the nature of the technology. Despite my minor annoyances with the IDE, this kit is truly worth it. Great project, great quality, great instructions (on seller’s website, not printed or included in the kit) and above all fantastic support. I had a defective epaper display... Daniel and his team at Thingpulse were incredibly helpful and when I had unsuccessfully tried some debug they recommended, they sent me a replacement. Excellent support. If this sounds like a fun project for you then I say go for it. Totally recommended.

This product is undoubtedly a great stepping stone to learning to use an e-ink display that is big enough to be useful. However, it’s is not perfect. The most serious issue was a faulty solder joint on the reset pin of the ESP8266, as shown in the annotated image. The poor connection due to inadequate solder was barely noticeable. It caused the device to boot loop after waking up. ie. the esp will be stuck waking up after the first sleep. Nonetheless, the staff on the support forum was very helpful in giving directions to address the issue. A quick resoldering job resolved the problem.It’s also worth noting, firstly, that perhaps due to the placement of the display with respect to the antenna, this ESPaper kit tends to receive a poorer WIFi signal, compared to that of a NodeMCU ESP8266 board, in my experience. Secondly, the battery jack used on this device is a JST-XH 2.54mm(pitch) connector, which is larger than most LiPo battery packs I can find on Amazon and eBay; they use the JST-PH 2.0mm connector. I had to buy the correct connectors and crimp terminals to attach a battery that is readily available online.All in all, this is a worthy board to buy for learning to using e-ink displays.

I've purchased and deployed two of these so far, mainly due to the form factor - an esp8266, charging circuit, 3 buttons and an e-paper display all in one slim package met my needs. The example code is very easy to follow and quickly brings you up to speed on using e-paper displays (as well as other helpful esp8266 programming tips). In my mind, a great product and value.

After trying a few e-ink boards, I was happy with the online instructions and demo code for the ThingPulse. I was able to get the Weather Station running in under 30 minutes and it works as expected. It is a good board for prototyping small e-ink applications and is easy to push code to using the standard Arduino IDE.