Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Simple Kindle E-ink E-paper Display Driver with MSP430

i have trying to get Kindle 6 inch e-ink display to work with Microcontroller quite some time because i really like the way e-ink display looks. Although many people have done it before but for some reasons there code was not working for me.  i have already tired with a my WireFrame FPGA Board but failed for unknown reason.  So i decided to give it try i designed a new board to give it Second Shot and i finally managed to get it "work" . this time i am using MSP430FR5739 microcontroller for no particular reason. i just needed a part so i used MSP430FR5739 Because i have used this before in my solar LED project.

This this just quick demo of concept to test if i got waveforms right. as MSP430FR5739 is quite slow and does have only 1KB of sram ,Controlling a 800x600 pixel display is really  pain. so i will use some powerfull microcontroller to display rich graphical content on this display.









Checkout next Project with E-ink


Schematic 

Figuring out schematic was very easy as there are may service manual available of e-readers . one of them is Sony PRS-505 , i have ordered one old bad battery one from ebay took it apart and  good thing about this e-reader there are test points available for every single point we need. Schematic available from my github account with link
 https://github.com/circuitvalley/E-ink_ED060SC4_driver_msp430/blob/master/Reference%20Documents/PRS-505_Service_Schematic.pdf

Schematic from service manual describe ever test point , so i just soldered few wires to





My schematic has basically no change since FPGA driver board , except VCOM voltage Opamp Circuit. High resolution PDF is available in my github account.


Wave form Reverse Engineering 
Image give blow , show a complete screen change. it consist of 38 individual frames .
One Full Screen change
one frame (First) from 38 Frames Required for screen change
Start Of one frame
Start of One frame Zoomed
one line writeof 800 pixel 
End of Line Write


PCB 
As this is just a quick test PCB to test waveforms i have not much on the board on the necessary components which are absolutely required to drive the display and all display pin are available on test points. 

PCB Design Source is available in my github account under this Repo




Firmware 
Firmware Source you can find in my github account
https://github.com/circuitvalley/E-ink_ED060SC4_driver_msp430


6 comments:

  1. Nice, Project! is it compatible with arduino ?

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    1. Project is written in C source is available in gitrepo , it can not be directly used in arduino IDE, but few changes here and there and it should do the trick.

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  2. What Voltages does your driver use?

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    1. here is the github repo , everthing is opensource

      https://github.com/circuitvalley/E-ink_ED060SC4_driver_msp430

      take a look at schematic for different voltage levels.

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  3. there is simlar kohocraft kit (from japan) available we had ordered that long back. we also tried with this display to reverse engineer kindle but our singals were not clear like yours our attempts to make it work failed many times and we left that project. but just two days back I took kohocrafts voltage and connector part and ported code to esp32 and it worked. though I could at max use 550x600 resolution buffer.

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  4. Do you have any problems with ghosting, since the eInk display driver doesn't seem to refresh the whole page when using the printstring(.) method.
    Also another question: The datasheet of the display states, that a whole page refresh takes around 1000ms and consumes 600mW of power typically. Can you confirm these values?
    Do you have any further documents on the display? I miss a detailed register description for example.
    I need these information for a university project and any help or information would be very appreciated.

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