TRMNL 7.5″ (OG) DIY Kit is a battery-powered $36 E Ink display with WiFi, a battery, and dozens of software plugins

Disclosure: Some links on this page are monetized by the Skimlinks, Amazon, Rakuten Advertising, and eBay, affiliate programs, and Liliputing may earn a commission if you make a purchase after clicking on those links. All prices are subject to change, and this article only reflects the prices available at time of publication.

TRMNL sells a $139 small E Ink display that you can use to show news updates, weather forecasts, calendar appointments, photos, or all sorts of other content. But TRMNL isn't just a hardware company – the team also makes the open source software that runs on that device, and even shares information on how to turn a jailbroken Amazon Kindle or other devices into a DIY TRMNL device.

Don't have an E Ink device handy and don't want to spend $139 on TRMNL hardware? Now there's a much cheaper option: Seeed Studio has introduced an official TRMNL 7.5″ (OG) DIY Kit that sells for $45, although it's out of stock as of July 22, 2025.

The kit is the result of a collaboration between Seeed Studio and TRMNL and consists of:

7.5 inch, 800 x 480 pixel monochrome E Ink display

XIAO ePaper Display board (with XIAO ESP32-S3 Plus microcontroller)

7.4 Wh rechargeable battery (3.7V/2,000 mAh)

Since this is sold as a kit rather than a consumer-ready device, there's no case or enclosure included. Instead Seeed Studio offers a choice of two different enclosure designs that you can make using a 3D printer.

The kit gets up to 3 months of battery life if you set the screen refresh rate as low as once every six hours, which should be fine for some applications like weather forecasts. You'll obviously want to increase the refresh rates if you're hoping to use the device as a display for more up-to-date information like stock tickers or sports scores.

The ESP32-S3 Plus features two CPU cores that run at up to 240 MHz and integrated support for WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 5.0 LE. There mainboard also has NFC antenna pins, a battery connector, a USB-C port, power and reset buttons, three user keys, and several other connectors.

But the most useful thing about this kit is that it provides an affordable way to get started with the TRMNL ecosystem, which includes support for dozens of plugins (Seeed Studio says over 375 are supported, but only "82+" are listed at the TRMNL website).

via Seeed Studio Blog

This article was first published July 22, when pre-order pricing was set to $36. Since then the price has gone up to $45 for regular orders.

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal * If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it. Join 9,502 other subscribers