Earlier this year, Seeed Studio published a DIY guide for building OpenDisplay ePaper tags from parts and asked its community to vote on which screen sizes to prioritize next. The two winners — a 4.26-inch monochrome display and a 7.3-inch color display — are now shipping as fully assembled kits, built together with the OpenDisplay project.
What’s actually in the box
Both the 4.26″ Mono Kit and 7.3″ Color Kit are powered by Seeed’s ultra-low-power XIAO nRF52840-based ePaper driver board, and arrive fully assembled with a 2000 mAh rechargeable battery, a 3D-printed enclosure, and pre-installed OpenDisplay firmware — no soldering or flashing required out of the box. Estimated battery life runs up to two years on the mono kit and one year on the color kit, a gap that tracks with color ePaper’s higher refresh-power cost relative to monochrome.
Both kits are built for local Home Assistant integration via BLE, meaning the display talks to a home automation setup directly over Bluetooth rather than routing through a cloud service — relevant for anyone building an always-visible dashboard (weather, calendar, sensor readings) that they’d rather not depend on an external server staying online. Pricing starts at $39.90, available through Seeed’s official store and AliExpress.
From a developer’s hands into a product
Jonas Niesner, the developer and maintainer behind OpenDisplay, framed the partnership as a packaging problem solved: “Seeed Studio helps us turn Open Display into something people can pick up and use right away. Their hardware quality makes it easy to demonstrate the strengths of Open Display from setup to everyday use.” The underlying project stays open — OpenDisplay’s firmware and its Python control library are both open source — but the assembled kits remove the barrier of sourcing a battery, 3D-printing an enclosure, and flashing firmware before a first dashboard is even running.