If It’s Electronic Paper, Why Not Print To It?

A firmware fork for the ESP32-C3-based Xteink X3 and X4 e-ink readers implements the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP), letting users select the device as a standard printer from their OS and print documents directly to it. Since raster images are too large for the microcontroller's limited RAM, pixels are streamed row-by-row, written both to the screen and saved to the SD card, effectively turning the card into a printer output tray. The approach is compared to AlphaSmart word processors, which similarly used a simple emulation trick (acting as a USB keyboard) to transfer files easily.

Source: https://hackaday.com/2026/09/10/if-its-electronic-paper-why-not-print-to-it. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.