Inky Frame 7.3" (Pico 2 W Aboard)

An extra-large Pico 2 W powered E Ink® photo frame / home dashboard / life organiser with glorious colour display and wireless connectivity.

There's a new ePaper screen in town, and it's a biggie! Inky Frame 7.3" features a super crisp E Ink display with 800 x 480 pixels of seven-colour goodness. We've added 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 storing photos of fond maritime adventures (or whatever floats your boat).

Every Inky Frame comes with a pair of smart 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 mahoosive 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

Two variants are available - Inky Frame Only, or Inky Frame with Accessory Kit. Please select an option before adding it to your cart! 

What's new?

A new generation of ePaper is here! Inky Frames manufactured after August 2025 will use a new Spectra 6 E Ink® display panel which brings a number of improvements over the panels that we’ve used previously - notably a shorter refresh time and more saturated colours.

Pico 2 W x E Ink®

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 easily visible under bright lights.

E-paper is also ultra low power. It only consumes power whilst refreshing and the images on the display stick around for a really long time whilst the display is unpowered. This means these displays are perfect for powering from battery!

This display takes around 20-25 seconds to refresh so works best in projects that don't require constant screen updates.

Features

• Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W Aboard
  • Dual Arm Cortex M33 running at up to 150MHz with 520KB of SRAM
  • 4MB of QSPI flash supporting XiP
  • Powered and programmable by USB micro-B
  • 2.4GHz wireless
• 7.3" EPD display (800 x 480 pixels)
  • E Ink Spectra 6® technology
  • Colours: 6 (red, green, blue, yellow, black, white)
  • Dot pitch:  0.20 x 0.20mm
  • Aspect ratio: 5:3
  • Ultra wide viewing angles
  • Ultra low power consumption
• 5 x tactile buttons with LED indicators
• Two Qw/ST connectors for attaching breakouts
• microSD card slot *
• 8MB PSRAM
• Dedicated RTC chip (PCF85063A) for deep sleep / wake **
• Fully assembled
• No soldering required.
• Programmable with C/C++ or MicroPython

Inky Frame Only includes

• Inky Frame 7.3" (with Pico 2 W Aboard)
• 2 x metal legs

Inky Frame + Accessory Kit includes

• Inky Frame 7.3" (with Pico 2 W Aboard)
• 2 x metal legs
• 3 x AA battery pack
• 3 x AA alkaline batteries
• USB micro B cable
• Velcro square for attaching battery pack
• microSD card

Getting Started

To make it easy to get started, Inky Frame ships pre-loaded with pirate brand MicroPython and some fun examples that use the wireless capabilities of the Pico 2 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 2 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.

You can find more examples on Github:

• Inky Frame MicroPython firmware and examples

Connecting Breakouts

Inky Frame has two Qw/ST connectors (AKA Qwiic/STEMMA QT) so you can connect up Qw/ST breakouts easily using a JST-SH to JST-SH cable.

• View everything Qw/ST!
• Breakouts currently compatible with our C++/MicroPython build

Notes

• Measurements: 176.20mm x 139.20 mm (L x W)
  
• Usable area dimensions: 160 x 96 mm (W x H)
• * A micro SD card can be added to cache data downloaded over wifi or for logging information prior to uploading via wireless. It can also be used to preload assets for your user interface. Certain tasks (like decoding a jpeg or downloading a file) require an SD card to be present as they need a large working space and wouldn't be able to fit entirely in RAM.
• * We've found Pico flavoured C++/MicroPython is quite fussy about SD cards so if yours doesn't work, try another or formatting using FAT. The cards included in the Accessory Kit will work fine.
• ** Inky Frame's onboard RTC (Real Time Clock) means it can be put into a super deep sleep mode that only draws about 20uA of power. Inky Frame can turn off the power that drives the Pico W and the display completely. It can be woken back up by the RTC , the front buttons or the external trigger on the extension header. You can also read the RTC to keep track of the time and date, of course!
• On the expansion header is an external trigger input. if this is transitioned from low to high then Inky Frame will wake up from deep sleep. This lets you add your own wake button or circuit or build Inky Frame into a more complicated system. The external trigger is 3.3V max.
  

Revision History

• As of mid-December 2024, Inky Frame is now Pico 2 W Aboard! Pico 2 W and it's souped-up RP2350 chip bring some exciting improvements to Inky Frame - including a higher core clock speed, double the on-chip SRAM and double the on-board flash memory. The RAM upgrade in particular should help a bunch when working with this big display and with making requests from online APIs.
• We started shipping Inky Frames with six colour displays in September 2025. You can identify a Spectra 6 Inky by the black border along the top of the screen, where the ribbon cable connects. If you're writing your own code, make sure to initialise the correct display type (DISPLAY_INKY_FRAME_SPECTRA_7).

Resources

• Schematic
• Dimensional drawing