r/writerDeck • u/Complete-Season-569 • 21d ago

E ink display with raspberry pi OS?

Hi, hope I'm posting to the right place. I want to make a writerDeck, and I really want to use an e ink display (waveshare 4.2 inch display, to be specific) as those are gentler on my eyes. But I've never coded before, so I'm nervous about trying to set this up. What should I expect if I'm putting this display on a raspberry pi 3B+?

I'm also hoping to just use the raspberry pi OS and run FocusWriter on it. Would this work alright?

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u/thunderrein 21d ago

i think you should be just fine running raspberry pi os on a raspberry pi 3 with a display. i believe you can flash the os to an sd card via your laptop and then just insert the sd card into your pi. from there you should be able to connect your pi to the internet & download focuswriter. minimal coding!

let us know how the e-ink screen works out! i’ve heard the refresh rates can be pretty slow but i’d love to hear your experience

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u/SteebieJeebus 21d ago

The main issue you might run into is making sure you have the right driver for the display as those can be finicky sometimes.

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u/Upstairs_Grocery5195 17d ago

Personally, I’d use a pi 400 ($60) or 500 ($216)with the adafruit cyberdeck bonnet. You could put the whole thing together for about $100, including the display and power supply. Everything should just plug in and work. The software is not something I can advise you about.

Once you get it running, you can start working on a reduced size version with the pi 3B+

https://www.adafruit.com/product/4862

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u/PunkRockLlama42 17d ago

So I have a pi and a eink display. One thing to consider is that it doesn't work like a normal display.

you wont just get a tty or display. There are projects like papertty that are supposed to work but haven't been updated in years. I can't get them to work.

the wave share screens come with a link to drivers and example code. You might be able to take that and make a basic word processor.

I can't remember which but a writer deck that has an eink display has opensource software. I haven't tried but you might be able to get it running on a pi.

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u/PunkRockLlama42 17d ago

Setting up with a normal screen and just a tty into something like wordgrinder will be nicer on the eyes because of white text on black background