Does Running an E-Paper Display at 30 FPS Destroy It?

Although e-paper displays are famous for being low-power and lasting essentially forever if not damaged physically, the recent push to drive even cheaper e-paper displays at a framerate like 30 …. Does Running an E-Paper Display at 30 FPS Destroy It. The first being what this does to the power usage of these displays, and the second whether this will wear out the display in short order.

To investigate this, [Bo Made It] set up a few experiments. Subject of this test was a Waveshare ESP32-S3-ePaper board, which had previously been demonstrated running a Game Boy emulator at 30 FPS. With this software running, the board consumed on average about 115 mA, which would run down the device’s 400 mAh battery in about 3.5 hours.

From here key was to isolate the power consumption of the display itself, with the system minus the display updates consuming about 90 mA. Running the frame calculations for the greyscale mode without rendering to the screen pushed that up to 107.6 mA, with even in the 30 FPS greyscale mode the display thus only consuming about 7.4 mA, which is vanishingly small. Clearly the low-power claims of e-paper remain intact even at higher framerates.