Are there any good E-paper library besides GxEPD？ CalEPD!

Author：ShiningMan

To you, E-paper maniac and those engineers with EPD project must know GxEPD well！https://github.com/ZinggJM/GxEPD

The awesome JEAN-Marc created this GxEPD library and then also the GxEPD2 https://github.com/ZinggJM/GxEPD2.

The library supports most of SPI E-paper display from Good Display and Waveshare and is well rated an famous for easy to use, Arduino IDE-based, up-to-date among numerous EPD users.

However, just as e-paper ushered in the first year of its explosion in 2022, the blowout low-power Internet of Things demand has been defined and developed one after another.

The ESP32/C3/S2/S3 of the Espressif family, with low cost, powerful performance, domestic light, and many excellent open source projects, also stand out in the Internet of Things market.

From the quarterly and annual sales orders, we can find that the EPS32 series development boards are selling really well. (Based on Arduino-IDE; WiFi, BlueTooth functions need to be developed by ourselves)

In fact, the company had customers asking one after another last year: Is there an ink screen driver library for ESP-IDF? Let's take a look at all the points mentioned, and it is easy to draw a conclusion:

using ESP32 for e-paper project development is a hot topic,

And with the development of Espressif technology, the functions are becoming more and more powerful and diversified, and more people are no longer satisfied with the simple ESP32

Arduino framework. It is just necessary to use the ESP-IDF plug-in on VS Code or use Espressif's own IDE for development.

If anyone has already played ESP-IDF to the fullest and can support a series of electronic paper products of different colors and sizes, he will undoubtedly be ahead of others.

So, is there such a big guy and such a ready-made library? :)

Indeed, the CALE-IDF independently developed by Fasani Corp is based on ESP-IDF. It has CalEPD as the library to realize the electronic paper driver, and at the same time introduces other

external libraries such as AdafruitGFX, EPDiy, FT6X36 to support better display effects. Support IT8951 parallel port screen, support FocalTech touch screen and EPD.

https://github.com/martinberlin/cale-idf 

The positioning of CALE is a screen manager, the specific information can be browsed by yourself: https://cale.es/ 

*In the latest project progress, there is also EPAPER-WEATHER-STATION as a new branch. (Use the three libraries of EPDiy, SCD41, RTC-DS3231 to realize the linkage between the 9.7-inch parallel screen,

CO2 sensor and RTC) Fasani Corp has successfully won several international small projects with this EPAPER-WEATHER-STATION project.

*The number of CALE users has reached a stable scale of close to 200 after more than 2 years of development. In the very emerging e-paper market and still needing long-term and stable cultivation,

for a pure open source and non-commercial large-scale application For a free system, it's pretty good.

The above is some information about CALE-IDF and CALE. Let’s turn the topic back. CalEPD is the key to successfully drive various electronic paper products on ESP-IDF.

The picture below is the latest situation. It can be clearly seen that just the products of GOOD DISPLAY already have a long list of model drivers to support, and we are still in stable cooperation,

adding more and updated products to the support list one after another. . (In this CalEPD folder, EPD driver, SPI protocol, each model of electronic paper, they will have a corresponding header file and a .cpp file)

Regardless of whether you are an experienced developer or an amateur like me writing this article, you can get started with CalEPD in no time.

Of course, if you haven't tried it yet, and the current PC has not yet configured the environment, you can refer to this Wiki to quickly complete the configuration.

https://github.com/martinberlin/cale-idf/wiki/Installing-Espressif-IDF-toolchain-on-Windows

In the next issue, I will explain more about CalEPD.