Does Running An E-Paper Show At 30 FPS Destroy It?
Although e-paper shows are well-known for being low-power and lasting basically endlessly if not broken bodily, the current push to drive even cheaper e-paper shows at a framerate like 30 FPS for a good monochrome gaming expertise does increase a couple of questions. The first being what this does to the ability utilization of those shows, and the second whether or not this may put on out the show in brief order. To examine this, [Bo Made It] set up a few experiments.
Subject of this check was a Waveshare ESP32-S3-ePaper board, which had beforehand been demonstrated operating a Game Boy emulator at 30 FPS. With this software program operating, the board consumed on common about 115 mA, which might run down the machine’s 400 mAh battery in about 3.5 hours. From right here key was to isolate the ability consumption of the show itself, with the system minus the show updates consuming about 90 mA.
As for lifespan, one datasheet provides the standard lifespan as a million updates. This would translate to about 9.3 hours at 30 FPS, although that assumes a full show refresh. Since a sensible driver solely updates modified pixels, clearly this will probably be longer, however the query is how for much longer, and what’s going to degradation appear like?
After operating 2.16 million frames of a customized endurance check that includes repeating patterns, some ghosting was obvious, however repeated refreshing made this go away once more. This signifies that thus far no everlasting harm has been detected inside the little doubt conservative restrict supplied by e-paper producers.
It needs to be famous that Waveshare itself additionally recommends in opposition to operating such high-FPS functions on their machine, that means that that is positively one massive longevity experiment. If precise harm happens, which means clearly this received’t be lined below any guarantee.
