① Hardware Checklist

Necessary Hardware #

• A Pi 4

These are hard to come by these days, and are stupidly overpriced (( thanks Covid )). So I’m not gonna include a link.

SD Card of non-suckage ™️ #

You’re likely to want a Micro SD Card that doesn’t suck.
The cards that I’ve been using with reasonable success and good speeds are

SanDisk Extreme Pro MicroSDXC

• 64G
• 128G

Additional hardware that makes life more awesome™ #

• Micro HDMI to HDMI adapter
• Keyboard

WaveShare 2.13 inch ePaper Hat #

You could use a larger one too. This just happens to be what I have lying around.

Waveshare’s got their new v3 version:

• 2.13inch E-Ink V3, 250x122 Black/White

This is what I had lying around.

• 2.13inch E-Ink 212x104 Red Black White

Rpi Name [Pin]	Eink Hat Pin	Function
3.3v [1,17]	1 Red	VCC
GND [39,20]	2 Black	GND
GPIO10 [19]	3 Blue	DIN
GPIO11 [23]	4 Yellow	CLK
GPIO 8 [24]	5 Orange	CS
GPIO25 [22]	6 Green	DC
GPIO17 [11]	7 White	RST
GPIO24 [18]	8 Brown	Busy

PoE Hat #

PoE can be NOISY electrically speaking

The PoE Hats I’ve tried out caused some weird artifacts on the eInk displays…
I found that using Power/Ground from the PoE Hat was problematic. I was getting a LOT more noise and artifacts when using those pins.
Using the power and ground direct from the RPi solved the problems I was experiencing.
YMMV.

I’ve tried a few PoE Hats with varying degrees of success.
The version I have isn’t for sale any longer, but this is the next generation of it:

• UCTRONICS PoE HAT for Raspberry Pi 4B, IEEE 802.3af-Compliant, 5V 2.5A Mini Power Over Ethernet Expansion Board for Raspberry Pi 4 B 3 B+

The version I got from this vendor seem to work just fine on a Pi4.

Good To Know

The main caveat I’ve found is these will ONLY work when receiving power from an 802.3af compatible PoE source.

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