Seeed Studio and TRMNL Ship a $48 DIY E-Paper Display Kit

A $48 kit from Shenzhen hardware maker Seeed Studio, built with platform company TRMNL, puts an always-on 7.5-inch e-paper display in a buyer's kitchen without a recurring subscription. The price is real. So are the caveats. Ars Technica reporter Nick Indge, who built and tested the kit, found the hardware cheap and the software paths uneven.

What does $48 actually buy?

The box contains a XIAO ePaper Display Dev Board with a XIAO ESP32-S3 Plus module onboard. It does not contain a stand. Indge forgot to order one and paid $8 to print a case at his local library on a Bambu printer. Two official case designs exist: a triangular prism and an L-shaped shell. He chose the L-shape and regretted it. The design forced him to cut a channel for the ribbon cable, and the fragile FPC connector resisted bending around the case's sharp angle. A paper-tape trick, suggested by a commenter on MakerWorld, solved the routing problem.

Seeed Studio designs and manufactures the hardware. TRMNL maintains the firmware, plugins, and hosted service. Ryan Kulp founded TRMNL in 2023, and the company's first e-paper device shipped through crowdfunding in 2024. Seeed teased an XIAO e-paper panel on social media in March 2025; a community member asked whether it could run TRMNL firmware, and the two firms announced an official partnership in July 2025.

What are the three software paths?

Buyers choose among three setups, each with a different cost in money or effort.

• TRMNL cloud: trmnl.com serves as the information server, with a 14-day trial and a one-time $50 license fee afterward. The "free" trial requires a $1 credit-card charge up front. The cloud handles all rendering; the device only displays API data.
• SenseCraft: Seeed's free platform includes a browser-based flashing tool, a plugin repository, and Home Assistant compatibility. The trade-off, Indge notes, is that Seeed is based in China and operates under its own privacy policy. He also failed to get several SenseCraft feeds to render, and much of the content targets the Chinese market.
• BYOS: TRMNL's open-source Terminus container runs on a user's own server. The GitHub page promises "privacy first functionality" and states: "You own the stack and the data." The stack includes Sidekiq, Postgres, Valkey, and a certificate initializer across multiple containers.

Indge chose the self-hosted route and hit friction. Bridge networking broke the stack on his Unraid machine; it worked on a second box running CasaOS. Firmware flashing failed repeatedly on his Fedora PC before succeeding on the first try on a MacBook Pro. His unit shipped with firmware 1.5.12, far behind the current 1.8.18 release.

How does it perform?

The display's core commercial claim comes from Seeed: three months of battery life. That figure assumes one refresh every six hours. Indge, who prefers hourly refreshes, did not test the claim and notes it would fall sharply at his cadence. USB-C power makes the battery question largely moot.

In daily use, the monochrome screen proved legible from across a room. His son's verdict on the lunar-cycle plugin: "now I'll always know what moon we have." The TRMNL marketplace offers standard plugins — Google Calendar, weather, stock quotes — alongside niche items such as rotating Ferengi Rules of Acquisition factoids. Users can also write plugins in HTML, which the screen renders as a bitmap.

The kit does not compete with the $299 Apple HomeView hub or Amazon's assistants. TRMNL positions it as entirely passive: information cycles on screen, and the device asks for nothing.

What does the total cost look like?

Indge's math is blunt. The $50 TRMNL license, if he adopts it after his trial, would push his total project cost above $100 — double what he expected. He plans to keep tinkering with the self-hosted Terminus route but admits the headache-free hosted option now looks "mighty tempting." Whether the DIY audience tolerates that friction, or pays the $50 to avoid it, will decide if this collaboration grows beyond the hobbyist niche.