Anyone else prefer e-paper over small LCDs for pocket builds?

I built something similar last year with a Pico W and one of the small e-paper breakouts, around 2.7 inches I think. Mine lives on the fridge showing a shopping list and it updates maybe twice a day at most. The battery is a single 18650 and I charged it in March. Last charge was in March. That's the whole reason I stuck with e-paper. When the thing sleeps it basicly uses nothing, and the display holds the image with zero power, so even a battery bump like that goes for months. But I also made a second one with a 1.3 inch IPS module for a bedside clock, and that thing needs charging every few days. The smooth scrolling is nice and dimming it at night works well, but I notice the charge cycle constantly and it annoys me. The e-paper one I forget about til I need it. One trick I learned on the e-paper side is to do a full refresh every fifth update or so. Clears the ghosting right up and only costs you a couple seconds. If your todo list only changes when you edit it, the slow refresh stops mattering after about a week of owning it.

If you want animation, IPS. If you want to pick it up after a month and have it still be alive, e-paper wins every time for me.

I did the opposite on mine and honestly I don't regret it. Mine is a small round LCD on a Pico that sits on my desk showing server stats and the time, and it's updating every second or two. Battery life is terrible, maybe two days off a small LiPo before I gave up and just left it plugged in. But the thing is, once you're plugged in anyway, the whole power arguement kind of evaporates. If your card is meant to be picked up and handed around like you describe, it's going to get used in short bursts at someone's desk, and there's ussually a USB port within arm's reach. The real dealbreaker for me with e-paper was trying to make it feel alive. Ghosting on partial refreshes drove me mad until I started doing a full refresh every fifth update, and even then animations are basically off the table. My LCD does a smooth scrolling ticker of notifications and people actually notice it. That said, the fridge list idea from the other poster is exactly the use case where I'd pick e-paper again. Question is wheather you see yours as a poster or a screen. For a poster, go e-paper and forget the battery. For a screen, plan on power being available.

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Same here on the ghosting fix, the periodic full refresh is what saved mine too. I've got a little badge with a 2.9 inch panel and a name tag layout on it, and once I stopped doing partial updates for anything with lines of text it looked clean again. The couple second flicker doesn't bother anyone since you're only redrawing when the content actually changes.

Mine's a desk widget that shows meeting reminders, and I landed on e-paper but with a twist. I added a single button that wakes it up and forces a refresh on demand, so when someone walks over it flickers once and shows the latest stuff. Kind of a best of both worlds thing since the deep sleep still does its job. Only annoyance is the wake takes a couple seconds, so people think it's frozen for a beat. Do you have any buttons on yours? Might scratch that interactive itch without eating the battery.

Update: sticking with the e-paper. Tried the full refresh trick from the badge thread, doing one every hour or so and keeping partial updates off for anything with text, ghosting is basically gone now. And reading that a fridge list can run months on one charge settled it, no way I'm giving that up for smooth scrolling.