About a month ago I purchased Inky pHat from Pimoroni, Pi hat with 220×104 red and black eInk screen. The device has an SPI interface with three additional GPIO signals: reset pin, command/data pin, and busy pin. Reset and busy pins are self-explanatory: the former resets device MCU the latter signals to the Pi whether the MCU is busy handling previous command/data. Command/data signals the type of SPI transaction that is about to be sent to Inky: low means command, high – data. It more or less matches interface to SSD1306 OLED display I played with before.
There is no datasheet or protocol description, so I used Pimoroni’s python library as a reference.
To communicate with the device over SPI, you need to apply spigen device-tree overlay and load spigen driver. For Raspberry Pi 3 you probably need a patch from this review applied. To load overlay add respective dtbo name to the fdt_overlays variable in /boot/loader.conf, e.g.:
fdt_overlays="spigen-rpi3"
I didn’t have any practical purpose for the device in mind so after several failed attempts to output RGB images in two color I ended up writing random ornament generator:
