“Overall, I'm pretty happy. A few pros and cons.
Pros:
- Much quicker refresh rates
- Pico 2 is masterfully soldered on, sits incredibly flush to the screen allowing it all to be mounted into a picture fram easily.
- Integrated buttons that interrupt the RTC and power the Pico back on
- Integrated JST for a battery pack, super easy to implement.
Cons:
- *Important* At least on my board, this is the A2 stepping version which prone to the E9 erratum. In laymans terms (as I had to learn all about this...), it will kill any battery-powered project without some brutalist workarounds to mitigate the issue. It may be worth buying the A4 stepping Picos separately?
- The screen is definitely less saturated than the older 7-colour models. Colours are a lot more muted, the example pictures have been selected to showcase the screen at its best. Taking a normal picture and displaying it, the results are normally pretty disappointing. But for my use case -- writing and illustrations -- it is perfect.
- Screen is still very grey. This isn't particular to this board, but most colour boards have a very grey screen...and this is no different.
- RTC is finicky. The supplied Python wrappers (sleep_for) is pretty atrocious at handling anything that crosses the midnight mark due to the way the two clocks do/don't sync. If you just need your board to wake up every xx minutes, it's great! Wake up at time XX:YY, it is unncessarily complex to get up and running without very careful synchronisation.
Overall though, I'm happy -- it's put together really nicely but historical flaws in the silicon and some unnecessary effort required to use the RTC just keep it shy of brilliant.”
“Easy-to-program E-Ink display via Thonny. I will use it to monitor my sensor data from the garden and my solar power plant on the terrace. I can also run a slideshow with vacation photos.”
“The frame is great. I had never tinkered with anything like this before and the examples online were very straightforward. Came very quick too and was nicely packaged.”
