The detail that grabbed me first is the thinness: the whole handheld is 1.6cm thick, and inside that slim body sits a 1200mah battery sandwiched between two custom PCBs by a low profile pin header. Fitting a cell that size into a case that shallow is the sort of packaging work I really admire.
What the maker ended up with is a handheld interactive text adventure running on e-paper, housed in a translucent frosted enclosure with a black knurled rotary encoder in the upper-right corner. Everything here was designed and built by the maker: the PCB, the enclosure and the code, all running on an ESP32. The project came together over the last couple of weeks, driven by an appreciation for the beauty of e-paper and a wish to make something interactive rather than another static display.
In use, the knob scrolls through the story and picks actions, and the e-paper refreshes after a scroll or a press. The internal multi-color LED shifts between violet and warm amber to match narrative events, and the display and light both update to reflect the scene atmosphere. The maker reports the result is very compact and feels great to hold.
The one thing I would like to know more about is the pause between scenes: a title screen appears between scene generations, which hints that the e-paper refresh takes a noticeable moment. That is the classic trade-off with this display technology, and I would love to hear how long that wait lasts in practice.