Full discloser that the folks at Elecrow provided us a unit in exchange for writing an article about it. That being said, at the price range they sell these for – it isn’t an expensive enough of item to influence my opinion. Not to mention that they aren’t available on Amazon, which we leverage for some affiliate sales. Lastly this article is late because I was expecting just a 4.2″ E-paper Display, not a FULL system in a nice case.
with 400*300 Resolution, Black/White Color Driven By SPI Interface
Specifications to go here . . .
| Size | ||||||
| Color | ||||||
| Flash | ||||||
| PSRAM | ||||||
| Resolution | ||||||
| Partial Refresh | ||||||
| Communication Interface | ||||||
| Battery Connection | ||||||
| GPIO connection | ||||||
| TF Card |
One pet peeve of mine has to do with the packaging for a lot of the components I buy. I can’t tell you how often items arrive with bent pins or packaging damaged to the point that I wonder if the item itself had its lifespan shortened by the abuse. Elecrow? That isn’t how they operate. At some point I’ll do a write up about the CrowView Note I bought from them (it was packaged quite well) and I can say I was impressed with this item on all fronts. The box was thick, the bubble wrap was adequate. And there was plastic film protecting the screen as well as the back. I’ll touch more on why the film on the back is relevant later. Oh, and it was nice to see a USB-C cable included. I’ve only just started to tinker with microcontrollers that leverage this connector and I sheepishly have to admit that my dev area is short on USB-C cables. Needless to say you can be up and running fast with this device.
The first thing you will notice once it is out of the box is how solid it feels. They page states that it is 185 grams. That is 6.5 ounces for those of you here in the US with me. It is nice to see that there are several buttons and a nice rotary switch for moving through menus. The device comes preloaded with quite a nice demo app. One item that threw me off – you use the rotary dial as a button to select certain items. I’m not one that is much on reading the instructions and kept messing my experience up by pressing the MENU or EXIT buttons. The front does not have any labeling for the dial or the side buttons, but then they really aren’t there for most end-user usage. If you have a user interface, you’ll likely use larger buttons or dials and just leverage the GPIO connection on the top.
If you don’t install the ESP32 Board Package, the Arduino IDE will think you have an Arduino Uno connected. The video does cover how to do this. Then you need to configure IDE – DETAILS HERE.
The sample code in the video was too blurry for me to read. I’ll add some code here once I actually send something to the device. Right now I don’t want to lose the demo – it is too cool to show off!
Pros:
- Solid build.
- Very crisp display with a VERY wide viewing angle.
- 6 display sizes to choose from. Once you are familiar with the device, porting code between models should be low level of effort.
- Full featured – TF Card Slot, lots of buttons for configuration and deployment.
Cons
- GPIO connections could interfere with how you mount the device.
- I didn’t see Wi-Fi mentioned on any of the documentation. It would be great if it did have Wi-Fi. Likely not, and I’d like to research what I can do for connectivity through the GPIO pins.