I recently found the author clock, and it inspired me to do my own version. I won’t actually bother with the clock function; just an e-ink display in my living room I can control. Something I can feed whatever text I like and have it rotate periodically. From a quick look around, I’m finding Waveshare, Inkbox, and TRMNL. I’m looking for something I can have some degree of remote control over so I don’t have to go plug it in constantly. It seems like all three can achieve this. I don’t love the looks of the Inkbox or TRMNL, and they’re more expensive. The wooden housing on the author clock would look really nice in my space and I’d love to recreate that. But I wanted to see how difficult it is to frame up, set up, and maintain a Waveshare before I dive in. Particularly since it seems that you need to integrate a pi for those.
I’m doing a project of my own on an eink display. Like the other poster mentioned it’s an esp32 but it has a full dev kit. It’s called the paper v1 from m5stack. The esp32 has wifi, bluetooth, the eink display is touch enabled, it is a fully enclosed little device with a battery so it doesn’t need to be plugged in constantly. Possibly cheaper option than a pi+eink like you’re looking at, and likely uses a lot less electricity. I’ve seen videos of people who upgrade the battery in theirs. I’m not sure those applications work on it, but it’s possible something similar is built for the esp32.
https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5paper-esp32-development-kit-v1-1-960x540-4-7-eink-display-235-ppi?variant=39966887903404