End-to-end Spectra 6 e-paper products
Hardware, firmware, and cloud — from the team that ships 8frames, a consumer 6-color e-paper photo frame. Bring us a use case; we hand you a working prototype in six weeks and a manufacturable unit soon after.
Fit check
Green light
Refresh once a day, or less
Prices, floor plans, room bookings, work-order status, gallery labels — content that changes on human timescales, not every second.
Six colors are enough
Black, white, red, yellow, blue, green. Brand marks, wayfinding hues, status coding, illustrated art. Photos work too, if you like the dithered look.
Wireless, battery-powered by default
You want to stick it on a shelf, a wall, a bin, or a bus stop — not run conduit. Weeks-to-years between charges depending on refresh rate.
Volumes from 50 to 5,000 units
Boutique batch runs where the big ESL vendors won’t bid and a generic embedded shop is too slow.
We’ll tell you no
Video, animation, or scrolling text
Full-color e-paper refreshes in 15–30 seconds. If you need motion, use an LCD.
Photograph fidelity as the buying trigger
Spectra 6 is stunning for illustration and brand-controlled photography. It is not a substitute for a 4K OLED gallery panel.
Sub-second, real-time price changes
That’s Hanshow / SES-imagotag ESL territory. Different waveform, different economics.
What you get
You can hire us for the whole thing, or slice off the layer you’re missing. Most engagements are all three; the moat is that they were designed together for the same reference product.
Hardware
ESP32-S3 reference design as the starting point. Custom driver board, battery topology, USB-C or Qi charging, mounting. FCC/CE modular certification path baked into the schematic.
Firmware
The firmware we ship in 8frames, adapted to your product. Sub-100 µA sleep, waveform LUTs tuned per lot, deterministic OTA, factory-reset flow, provisioning UX that doesn’t need an app.
Cloud
Next.js + Supabase content management. Per-device slots, scheduled refresh, image dithering in the browser, role-based access. Deployed under your brand on Vercel, or hosted by us as a managed SaaS with per-device MRR.
Where we’re strongest
Not because Spectra 6 can’t do the other things — because these three cluster nicely around one reference design and one cloud stack. Something adjacent? We’ll tell you honestly in the scoping call.
Retail brand & endcap
Endcap A4 and A3 signs, category headers, and brand-owned shelf cards. Weekly promotions push from a CMS your merch team already uses. Wireless, magnetic-mount, weeks between charges. Adjacent to ESL — not competing with Hanshow.
Read the deep dive →
Workplace signage
Room signs with color-coded status. Desk plates that follow hot-desk bookings. Floor-plan wayfinding that changes with the org chart. Plays nicely with Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and Robin. Color is the wedge — everyone else still ships monochrome.
Read the deep dive →
Industrial e-labels
Reusable warehouse bin labels. Kanban cards that reflect real MES state. Work-order travelers that survive a wash-down. Color signals status the way factory-floor lean practice already reads it — green run, yellow hold, red stop.
Read the deep dive →
Why us, not a generic embedded shop
Living reference
8frames is us, in the wild.
The consumer photo frame at 8frames.io runs the exact ESP32-S3 + Spectra 6 reference we’d adapt for you. Firmware, cloud, provisioning, OTA — all field-tested by real customers, not a demo booth.
Panel supply
Direct line to Good Display.
Spectra 6 panels are a bottleneck. We buy the 7.3″ GDEP073E01, 10″ GDEP100E01, and 13.3″ GDEP133C02 at direct-supply pricing and can quote lead times on the same call. You don’t chase allocations — we do.
Speed
Prototype in six weeks or the NRE is free.
Custom PCB spin, firmware fork, cloud instance, and a working unit on your desk in 42 days from kickoff. We can quote it that fast because we’re not designing the stack — we’re adapting one that already ships.
Process
We can quote a six-week prototype because we’re not designing an e-paper stack from scratch every time. We fork a stack that already ships in a live consumer product.
Week 0
Scoping call
30 minutes. We tell you whether Spectra 6 is the right substrate and, if it is, what shape the six weeks will take. If we say no, you keep the notes.
Week 1
Fixed-fee proposal
Bill of materials, NRE, unit cost band at your target volume, and a week-by-week schedule. Signed SOW, one page. No lawyered-up master services agreement.
Weeks 2–3
Hardware spin
Reference schematic forked to your form factor. Fab and stuff a small batch. Enclosure CAD to a 3D-print prototype in parallel.
Weeks 3–5
Firmware & cloud fork
Our shipping firmware and Next.js CMS forked into your GitHub org. Your branding, your auth, your CMS schema. Custom refresh schedule, custom dithering pipeline if content demands it.
Week 6
Prototype delivery
A working unit on your desk. Full source in your repo. A live cloud instance you can log into. Signed transfer of IP.
Weeks 6+
Manufacturing hand-off
Small-batch runs by us (you invoice as ODM) or DFM package for your CM. FCC/CE modular certification path is already in the schematic — you don’t pay for a full-radio filing.
FAQ
What is E Ink Spectra 6 and how is it different from Kaleido 3 or Gallery 3?
Spectra 6 (also written E6) is E Ink’s six-pigment electrophoretic film — black, white, red, yellow, blue, green — in one microcapsule layer, no color filter overlay. It’s tuned for static signage and shelf-edge use: 20–30 second full refresh, saturated printer-quality colors, no glow, no glare. Kaleido 3 uses a color filter over a monochrome panel — faster, dimmer, better for eReaders. Gallery 3 (ACeP) hits ~50,000 shades but is slower and mostly used in tablets.
What panel sizes and models do you build against?
Our reference stack is on the 7.3″ Good Display GDEP073E01 (800×480). We also work with the 10″ GDEP100E01 and the 13.3″ GDEP133C02 (1600×1200), and we can quote against E Ink’s 13.3″ and larger Spectra 6 panels for signage. Custom sizes need volume commitments — we’ll tell you honestly whether it’s worth the MOQ.
What’s the smallest engagement you take?
$20k NRE minimum, for a proof-of-concept unit and a small batch (10–50 devices) on our stock reference hardware in your enclosure. That gets you a working thing to demo. Full custom engagements usually run $50k–$150k NRE plus unit cost at volume.
Who owns the IP?
You do — everything except our internal reference stack (which we license to you as source, non-exclusively). No royalties per unit, no lock-in. You can hand the repos to a different manufacturer next year.
Do we have to use your cloud?
No. The white-label Next.js CMS ships as source into your GitHub org and deploys on your Vercel account. We also offer it as a managed SaaS — same code, we host — which most teams pick because it’s cheaper than staffing DevOps for a fleet under 1,000 devices.
What about FCC / CE certification?
The reference schematic uses an ESP32-S3 module that already carries FCC and CE modular certifications. That collapses your filing from a full intentional-radiator test (~$15k) to a much cheaper compliance package (~$3k). We’ll walk you through which parts of your build affect this.
Where are you based?
The engineering team is remote-first across the US and East Asia. Panels and small-batch assembly run through partners in Shenzhen. Pilot batches ship from Hong Kong; production ships wherever your logistics team wants.
No sales-cycle rituals. The scoping call is you describing the product and us either saying yes with a rough plan, or saying no and pointing you at whoever can actually help.