M5Stack announced the PaperDIY kits on 16 October. There are two, and the difference between them is the only thing you need to decide.
| Assembly Kit (K159) | Complete Kit (K159-B) | |
|---|---|---|
| Assembly | You do it | Done at the factory |
| Enclosure | None — open structure | PLA shell, pre-fitted |
| Enclosure model | n/a | Open-source, reprintable and modifiable |
| In the box | E-paper panel + main board + 140 mAh battery + acrylic screen pressure plate | Same, inside the shell |
Everything else is identical. And the open-structure version is not a downgrade — it is the point. M5Stack’s own description is that it “allows users to design their own peripheral structures.”
The specification
| SoC | ESP32-S3-WROOM-1-N16R8, Xtensa 32-bit LX7 dual-core @ 240 MHz |
| Flash / PSRAM | 16 MB / 8 MB Octal |
| Wireless | 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi |
| Panel | ED047TC1, 4.7”, 540 × 960, 16 grey levels |
| Storage | microSD |
| Power | 3.7 V battery, USB Type-C (5 V), 5 V pad |
| Power management | M5PM1 |
| Battery | 140 mAh, SH1.0-2P connector |
| Buttons | 1 × power (on / off / reset / boot) + 2 × user |
| Expansion | 2 × FPC 0.5 mm 12-pin |
| Size / weight | 115.3 × 62.5 × 5.5 mm, 26.4 g |
| Operating temperature | 0–40 °C |
| Consumption | 4.2 V @ 40.95 mA, peak 161 mA |
Two numbers in there set expectations. 140 mAh is a small cell — the fully-assembled M5PaperS3 carries 1800 mAh — and at 41 mA working current you are looking at a few hours of active use, not weeks. E-paper costs nothing to hold an image but a fair amount to change one, and the boost circuit for the panel is what the peak 161 mA is paying for. For a desk display that refreshes every few minutes on a USB-C cable, fine. For a battery-only wearable, plan on a bigger cell; the connector is a standard SH1.0-2P.
The second is 5.5 mm thick, 26.4 g. That is thin enough that the acrylic pressure plate is doing real structural work, and thin enough to drop into something you print yourself.
What is not here
Worth stating clearly, because the M5Stack e-paper line now has several members and they are easy to confuse. The PaperDIY has no touch panel and no real-time clock. The M5PaperS3 has both — a GT911 capacitive panel with two-point touch and gestures, and a BM8563 RTC — plus the much larger battery.
So the PaperDIY is the cheaper, barer, open-mechanics member of the family. If your project needs to wake on a schedule while unplugged, the missing RTC is the constraint to design around, not the battery.
The FPC headers are the actual feature
Two 0.5 mm 12-pin FPC connectors, and M5Stack documents both pinouts fully. One is wired for I2S — bit clock on G5, LRCK on G2, DSDIN on G1, DOUT on G0, MCLK on G45, plus the system I²C pair and a 3V3_AU audio rail. The other is wired for SPI, with CS, MOSI, MISO, SCK, plus reset, busy, IRQ and a switch line routed through the power-management chip.
An audio-capable expansion header on an e-paper board is not an obvious combination, and it opens up the things e-paper is otherwise bad at: a slow-refresh score display for a sound piece, a tactile instrument whose labels change between pieces, a field recorder with a readable screen in daylight. The SPI header with reset and busy lines is shaped for a second display or a radio.
The e-paper panel itself hangs off an 8-bit parallel bus (G6–G14 for EPD_DB0–7) with timing lines on G16/G15/G13/G18/G17, and the panel’s power is gated through the M5PM1’s PYG2 while G46 enables the boost converter. If you are writing your own driver, that gating is the first thing to get right.
Flashing it
The power button is overloaded, and the sequence is worth memorising:
- Single click — power on / reset
- Double click — power off
- Long press — download mode
For firmware, connect USB-C, hold the power button about two seconds until the red LED blinks, then release. M5Stack provides an Arduino quick-start, an M5PM1 power-management library, M5Unified and M5GFX drivers, an ESP-IDF factory-firmware source release, and a web burner for the factory image. Schematics, model dimensions, the ESP32-S3-WROOM-1-N16R8 datasheet and the ED047TC1 datasheet are all on the product page.
Which one to buy
If you intend to put it in something — a frame, an instrument panel, a door sign, a cassette-sized case — buy the Assembly Kit and print your own. If you want a finished object on a desk by Saturday, buy the Complete Kit; the shell model is open-sourced either way, so you keep the option to reprint it in a different material or modify it later.
M5Stack has not published prices on either documentation page, and the shop URLs for both SKUs were not live at the time of writing. The docs are up, which is the unusual order to do this in.
Sources
- PaperDIY Assembly Kit (SKU K159) — M5Stack docs
- PaperDIY Complete Kit (SKU K159-B) — M5Stack docs
- New Arrivals: PaperDIY Assembly & Complete Kit — M5Stack
- M5Stack PaperDIY Kits pair an ESP32-S3 MCU with a 4.7-inch e-Paper display — CNX Software