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Hookup Guide

This tutorial explains how to get your E-Paper screen alive. It is split into the following three sections:

1) Hardware Hookup

Now it’s time to wire things up (if you have a Paperino Shield you can just jump over to the next section)! The breakout board provides access to 12 pins. To communicate with the display you will need eight pins: 3V3, GND, 4-wire SPI and two more pins for the IC (called reset & busy pin.) To get access to the integrated accelerometer you will need to connect more GPIO pins (called CS2, IN1 & IN2 optionally). You can see the wiring to some popular Arduino MCUs below:

generated with ISM

The following table summarises the needed connections again:

# Pin Function Photon* / Electron / Bluz Arduino MKRFOX1200 NodeMCU WeMosD1 Mini Raspberry Pi Zero W
1 MOS SPI MOSI A5 MOSI D7 D7 MOSI
2 MIS SPI MISO A4 MISO D6 D6 MISO
3 CLK SPI clock A3 SCK D5 D5 SCK
4 CS1 SPI chip select for ePaper driver IC A2** A2** D2** D2** D2**
5 RST Digital pin to reset driver IC A0** A0** D0** D0** D0**
6 BSY Digital pin to sense state of driver IC A1** A1** D1** D1** D1**
7 3V3 Regulated 3.3V power supply 3V3 VCC 3V3 3V3 3V3
8 GND Ground GND GND GND G GND
9 - (unused) (unused) (unused) (unused) (unused) (unused)
10 CS2 SPI chip select for accelerometer IC D6** A6** D3** D3** D3**
11 IN2 Interrupt line #2, e.g. for tap sensing WKP** A5** D4** D4** D4**
12 IN1 Interrupt line #1, e.g. for wake-up of deep sleeping MCU WKP** (not sup.) (not sup.) (not sup.) (not sup.)

* Same wiring as for Paperino Shield for Particle used ** or any other free GPIO pin

2) Using the Adafruit GFX Library with Paperino E-Paper display

Now that we have wired-up the Paperino breakout board with the MCU, it’s time to get started writing your own application! For this we’ll need to include the Adafruit GFX library and the hardware-specific library PL_microEPD. The integration varies depending on your used IDE.

Particle Web-IDE

If you are using the Particle Web-IDE please go to the Library Manager and search for PL_microEPD, you will see the latest version. Select one of the demos, i.e. the first one called _01_HelloWorld.ino and click on the button Use this example. This pastes a copy of the demo into your private App section. Now let’s repeat this step again by searching for Adafruit_GFX and add this library to the demo file by pressing the button Include in Project. That’s it, almost! You should now have a first demo with two linked libraries. All you need to check is the use of the correct pin mapping, which is described in the next section.

Arduino Web-IDE

After log-in to the Arduino WEB-IDE, please go to the libraries section and search for PL_microEPD. You will there get the latest library release together with the example sketches to start with (please proceed with the first example).

Arduino IDE

Check whether you have an actual release of the Arduino IDE installed or download the latest version from here. Then please follow “Sketch” — “Include Library” - “Manage Libraries...”, search for “PL_microEPD” and select the install button. This will copy the library and its demos sketches to your local Arduino folder. After rebooting the IDE, go to “File” - “Examples” - “PL_microEPD” where you can now see the different demos and for example load the first example.

3) Verifying the pin mapping

We are just there; just need to align the physical wiring from the previous section with the pin mapping in the sketch:

#define EPD_RST     A0      // Please align with your individual wiring
#define EPD_BUSY    A1      // Please align with your individual wiring
#define EPD_CS      A2      // Please align with your individual wiring

If you connected the reset pin physically with e.g. D0 (because your favourite micro controller has no Analog GPIOs available), then rename A0 with D0.

If you are interested in how to write more complex features on the ePaper we suggest continuing with the examples section.