Pi weekend: E‑Ink dash & Pi Zero 2 W
If you’re planning a maker weekend, How‑To Geek rounded up Raspberry Pi projects including a Waveshare 7.3‑inch color e‑ink dashboard build, and XDA argues the Pi Zero 2 W is the best value for most practical projects. The pairing—small, cheap Pi hardware plus a large color e‑ink display—makes an attractive dashboard or home‑info panel without stepping up to pricier models. That’s useful if you want a visible, low‑power project that still looks polished. (howtogeek.com) (xda-developers.com)
Electronic paper is the screen tech that looks like printed ink on paper, and the trick is that it keeps an image visible even after the power stops. Waveshare’s 7.3-inch panel uses a reflective color electronic paper design with no backlight, so it only needs meaningful power when the screen refreshes. (waveshare.com) That makes electronic paper good at one job and bad at another. It works well for a wall calendar, weather board, or transit dashboard that changes every few minutes, and it works poorly for video because Waveshare says the panel refreshes over a Serial Peripheral Interface link instead of acting like a fast monitor. (waveshare.com) The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is the tiny computer that fits this job because it is small, cheap, and already has wireless networking. Raspberry Pi lists a 1 gigahertz quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor, 512 megabytes of memory, built-in Wireless Local Area Network, and a 65 by 30 millimeter board size for the Zero 2 W. (raspberrypi.com) How-To Geek’s weekend project list on April 10, 2026 put those two ideas together by highlighting the Waveshare 7.3-inch color electronic paper display as a Raspberry Pi build for a home information panel. The site says the display plugs into the 40-pin General Purpose Input Output header used on most Raspberry Pi boards, which cuts down the wiring work for a quick project. (howtogeek.com) The display itself is large enough to look like a finished appliance instead of a tangle of parts on a desk. Waveshare lists a resolution of 800 by 480 pixels, support for seven colors, and a viewing angle above 170 degrees on the 7.3-inch panel. (waveshare.com) XDA’s argument on April 9, 2026 was that the Zero 2 W is the Raspberry Pi board that still feels sensibly priced for everyday tinkering. Raspberry Pi’s own store lists the Zero 2 W at $15, and XDA contrasted that with higher prices across more powerful single-board computers in 2026. (xda-developers.com) (raspberrypi.com) That pairing works because a dashboard does not need desktop-computer muscle. A board that can fetch weather, calendars, or Home Assistant data over Wi‑Fi and then redraw a mostly static screen is a better match for a low-power panel than a Raspberry Pi 5 driving a bright liquid crystal display. (raspberrypi.com) (waveshare.com) There is a catch, and it is the same catch every electronic paper project has. Waveshare says the panel needs ambient light because it has no backlight, so a hallway with weak lighting will make the dashboard look dull even if the software is perfect. (waveshare.com) There is another catch in the color itself. Waveshare’s seven-color panel is built for clean blocks of information and poster-like graphics, not smooth animation, so makers usually get the best results from big text, simple icons, and layouts that refresh on a schedule instead of every second. (waveshare.com) That is why this weekend-project combo is appealing right now. A $15 Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W can sit behind an 800-by-480 color electronic paper screen and turn a calendar, weather board, or smart-home status page into something that looks closer to framed wall art than to a spare computer monitor. (raspberrypi.com) (waveshare.com)
