The topic of I built a 10-inch ePaper dashboard for my 3D printer, and it’s the best display… is currently the subject of lively debate — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
I’ve tried a lot of Home Assistant dashboards, between tablets propped up on stands, old Android phones, cheap ESP32 displays, and more. Yet my favorites have always been the ePaper displays I’ve got to try, as those other options all have one thing in common: screens. They needed power, they needed to be on, and they’ll always draw your eye whether you want them to or not.
Seeed’s reTerminal E1003 doubles down on exactly what makes those other ePaper displays great. It’s a 10.3 inch monochrome ePaper display built around an ESP32-S3, and because it’s ePaper, it just sits there looking like a page until something on it actually changes. I’ve been testing one alongside its aluminum photo frame, and it’s quickly become one of my favorite displays. As always, there was some debugging and testint to get it up and running in ESPHome, but I managed it, and I love how it looks.
I’ll be upfront and say that if you want plug-and-play, this isn’t there yet for users who want to venture outside of Seeed’s SenseCraft HMI. Official ESPHome support is still in development, and I had to analyze a SenseCraft firmware binary to figure out how to interface with the touchscreen correctly through ESPHome. Overall, I only got it running thanks to a community ESPHome driver for the display and a bit of firmware reverse engineering for the touchscreen controller. On the bright side, you can use a combination of my findings and the custom driver I found for the display to get it working, and I’ll link those later on.
It wasn’t a smooth path, but the result has been one of the nicest, most pleasant-to-live-with Home Assistant dashboards I’ve put together. It’s the best-looking ePaper display I’ve used, so when those teething issues are out of the way, I can do nothing but sing its praises.
The reTerminal E1003 is a 10.3-inch ePaper display with 16 levels of grayscale, an ESP32-S3, temperature and humidity sensors, a buzzer, a microphone, and an optional aluminum frame. It’s powerful, genuinely useful, and looks fantastic.
This display boasts a 1872×1404 pixel resolution, and it’s a monochrome panel with 16 levels of grayscale for great contrast levels. I’ve used plenty of smaller e-paper panels, and the jump to ten inches changes what you can sensibly show on one. for example, I put together a full 3D printer monitoring dashboard with temperatures, fan speeds, print progress, and AMS filament slots that all fits on one page without feeling cramped. That’s a lot better than the dashboard I made for my CYD.
As well, those levels of grayscale do actually matter, as plenty of cheaper e-paper panels are 1-bit, meaning that your only options are black or white, and everything in between turns into dithered noise. The E1003 is a different story, though, as you can use different levels of grey to draw lighter elements, such as UI lines.
I’ve used the reTerminal E1001, E1002, and now the E1003, and while I was prepared to find it a step down from the Spectra 6 color E1002, it’s not really. Because it’s bigger, and it refreshes much faster, then it’s more of a question of what you want an ePaper dashboard to be rather than one being better than the other. Want a big display? Go for the E1003. Want full color? Go for the E1002. Both look good, and the E1003’s advantage in refresh speed and size might push it over the line for some.
However, the optional aluminum frame is the part that makes this extra special. It’s a pretty easy process too, and it requires removing the metal springs and unscrewing the back of the frame, sliding the reTerminal E1003 in, then putting it back together again. Then, you can either stand it up on a desk or hang it up on a wall. Because the whole panel is symmetrical, you can rotate it into portrait or landscape and the frame handles either. The aluminum also feels great, and it gives it a weight and finish that other plastic ePaper enclosures don’t have.
The hardware around the display is more generous than I expected, too. There’s 32MB of flash on the ESP32-S3, 8MB of PSRAM, and a microSD slot on the back. Between them, you’ve got enough headroom for a cached image dashboard or a TRMNL-style plugin setup without worrying about micromanaging memory.
There’s also an on-board temperature and humidity sensor, and the E1003 can publish its own environmental data back to Home Assistant rather than just displaying everything else’s. There’s also a buzzer there too that you can use for audible automation alerts, and they’ve wired in a PDM microphone that you can get working from following the published schematics from Seeed Studio.
Overall, this is the best ePaper device I’ve used from Seeed yet. It looks wonderful, it’s powerful, and the aluminum frame genuinely goes a long way towards making this feel like a premium piece of hardware that can fit in anywhere in your home.
Here’s where things get a little less clean, though it’s not really Seeed’s fault, either. They’ve been clear that ESPHome support for the E1003 is under development, and so is the open-source touch library, meaning that if you want to run this panel outside of SenseCraft HMI today, you’re doing it yourself. Seeed doesn’t control what gets merged to ESPHome, so they can’t force compatibility out of the box, and there are multiple pull requests on GitHub for the display controller currently.
The good news is that the community has been doing a lot of the work already. I’m using the Seeed 10.3-inch IT8951 ESPHome drivers as an external component, which handles the IT8951 controller and the SPI pipeline that actually pushes bits to the panel. Drop it in as a local external component, point ESPHome at it, set the right VCOM voltage, and the display itself lights up. This didn’t take much work to get up and running, as the work was already done for me.
The touchscreen, though, became a considerable time sink. When I first flashed the E1003, touch simply did nothing through ESPHome, and there was no public documentation pointing at what controller sat underneath the glass. SenseCraft HMI had gained touch support in a firmware update, even if there weren’t any features that could actively use it, so I pulled the firmware binary apart to see how it was implemented. Turns out it’s a GT911, a common I2C capacitive touch controller that ESPHome already supports natively. After that, it was just a matter of wiring the I2C bus to the right pins, enabling the gt911 platform, and everything worked.
The one area I’m still wrestling with is refresh performance. My custom draw pipeline ended up slower than I wanted, and when I dug in I traced most of the delay to the on_update() path in the IT8951 driver itself. An actual refresh is still as quick as ever, but a simple configuration that updates the display on a touch event takes almost 15 seconds to render, with 11 seconds of it coming from that driver. I’ve got some ideas, but I haven’t had the time to sit down and build it properly. For most dashboards that track use ePaper, such as one that tracks a 3D printer like mine, you don’t need updates to be faster than that anyway.
I built a Bambu Lab 3D printer monitoring system using an ESP32 CYD and the Bambu Lab HACS integration a while ago. It pulls in print progress, temperatures, fan speeds, AMS slots, and a few other bits, displaying all of it across four tabbed LVGL pages. I still love it, but because it’s a 2.8 inch screen, you have to flick between tabs to see what you care about at any given moment. On the E1003, though, I don’t have that problem. It’s more than big enough to fit everything on the one display, and I’ve published the YAML on GitHub if you want to check it out for yourself.
You lose colour, yes, and with ePaper you lose the instant-update feel too. If you want an animated arc that follows your print progress in real time, this isn’t the panel for you, but for a dashboard you actually keep near you for hours on end, always visible at a glance, I’d argue ePaper is the right answer. It’s proven to be incredibly valuable in my day-to-day workflows as it minimizes distractions, while still surfacing genuinely useful information at a glance.
ESPHome support from Seeed is in the pipeline, and SenseCraft HMI itself keeps picking up features in firmware updates. In a month or so, I suspect most of what I’ve described here will be baked in, and the average Home Assistant user will be able to grab one of these off the shelf and get a dashboard up in a few hours. You technically can do that right now if you use my ESPHome configuration and the external component linked.
If you don’t want to touch ESPHome at all, you’ve also got options. SenseCraft HMI is Seeed’s own no-code platform, and it ships on the device by default. You log in, drag widgets for your trackable entities onto a canvas, and push the result to the panel. It’s not as flexible as writing your own layout, and as of today it still doesn’t expose touch interactions through its editor, but it does get a working dashboard on screen with zero code. You can serve your own data by sending it to SenseCraft HMI as well. Others can also upload their own layouts for the reTerminal E1003, but there aren’t many available just yet.
TRMNL is the other path worth checking out. It’s a plugin-based e-paper dashboard service, and the E1003 is compatible out of the box. Point the panel at your TRMNL account and you can use any of the existing plugins, from calendar views to stock tickers, without ever opening ESPHome.
Until then, if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t mind cloning a GitHub repo into an ESPHome project, you can absolutely make this work right now. The hardware is excellent and the frame is nice. The only thing holding the E1003 back from being the Home Assistant display I recommend to everyone is the software, and given Seeed’s track record, that almost certainly won’t be an issue in just a few weeks.
Why it matters
News like this often changes audience expectations and competitors’ plans.
When one player makes a move, others usually react — it is worth reading the event in context.
What to look out for next
The full picture will become clear in time, but the headline already shows the dynamics of the industry.
Further statements and user reactions will add to the story.