Inky Frame 4.0" (Pico W Aboard) – Inky Frame + Accessory Kit

A compact Pico W powered E Ink® photo frame / home dashboard / life organiser with super concentrated seven colour display and wireless connectivity.

Inky Frame 4.0" features a vibrant E Ink display with 640 x 400 pixels of tightly packed seven colour goodness - that's almost as many pixels as on our 5.7" Inky Frame, but squished tidily into a smaller footprint. There's five buttons with LED indicators for interacting with the display, two Qw/ST connectors for plugging in breakouts and a micro SD card slot for storage of capybara photos or other vital files.

Every Inky Frame comes with a pair of sleek little metal legs so you can stand it up on your desk (and a selection of mounting holes if you'd prefer to do something else). There's also a battery connector so you can power it without annoying trailing wires, and some neato power saving features that mean you can run it from batteries for ages.

Here are some things we reckon this petite Inky would be great for:

💡 An ultra readable, low power consumption home automation dashboard

🖼️ Displaying stylised photos, pop art images or favourite comic panels.

📊 Showing cute graphs and readouts from local or wirelessly connected sensors

👀 Displaying fascinating data from online APIs.

Multi-colour EPD displays use ingenious electrophoresis to pull coloured particles up and down on the display. The coloured particles reflect light, unlike most display types, meaning that they're visible under bright lights. It takes approximately 30 seconds to refresh the display, so they work best in projects that don't need constant refreshing.

E-paper is also ultra low power (EPD displays only consume power while they're refreshing), and the images on the display stick around for a really long time whilst the display is unpowered.

Our C++/MicroPython libraries include support for the Inky Frame display. You'll get best performance using C++, but if you're a beginner we'd recommend using our batteries included MicroPython build for ease of getting started.

You can draw on the screen using our lightweight PicoGraphics library, which includes functions for displaying text, shapes and images (plus individual pixels of course), and we've provided some examples to get you started.

Inky Frame 4.0" ships pre-loaded with MicroPython and some fun examples that use the wireless capabilities of the Pico W to display interesting things. To enable Inky Frame to connect to the internet, you'll need to save a file called secrets.py to the Pico W using Thonny. It should contain the following lines:


WIFI_SSID = "your_ssid_goes_here"
WIFI_PASSWORD = "your_password_goes_here"

To return to the launcher, hold down buttons A and E and tap reset.

MicroPython

C/C++

The Qw/ST connectors on Inky Frame make it super easy to connect up Qwiic or STEMMA QT breakouts. If your breakout has a QW/ST connector on board, you can plug it straight in with a JST-SH to JST-SH cable.

Breakout Garden breakouts that don't have a Qw/ST connector can be connected using a JST-SH to JST-SH cableplus a Qw/ST to Breakout Garden adaptor. Want to use >2 breakouts at the same time? Try this adaptor!

Our new Pico W Aboard products come with a built in Raspberry Pi Pico W. This means you get all the advantages of a RP2040 microcontroller - a speedy fast dual-core ARM processor, a dynamic, growing ecosystem and a choice of different programming methods to experiment with. Most excitingly though, Pico W has wireless connectivity, so your Pico/RP2040 devices can communicate with each other, and the internet! 🌍