It looks really cool!
It's this product, which is built around a ED133UT2 panel by E Ink: https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/epaper-1/...
You can find this unit and other IT8951-based driver boards for it on a few different places/in different catalogs but Waveshare's easy and the price seems OK.
The ED133UT2 is a Carta 1200 display. The latest Carta gen is the 1250, but AIUI it's only relevant for color displays with the change being a thinner film that allow plastic color filters to be closer to the ink to improve contrast. I think the current greyscale 13.3" offered by E Ink's direct shop for $449 sans driver is still a 1200 - at least many vendors list VB3300-NCB as just an alternate name for the ED133UT2. The Carta range of displays are well-known from Amazon's Kindle and many other reader products, so my newspaper is basically a big honking DIY Kindle.
They also offer a 10.3" panel with even higher resolution for half the price of the 13.3" that's supported by the same controller and should be fantastic for all sorts of home dashboards.
Direct sunlight can also be a big problem for this display tech, so I'm intentionally hanging it on a wall facing away from the most intense daytime sunlight I get.
Hope it survives at least a couple of years.
I saw something like this a couple of years ago and wanted to do it myself. However the cost was relatively unattainable at the time, I'm glad to see it is getting more affordable!
While cobbling together my project I was really tempted to go custom PCB with the ESP and the ITE controller on one board. Looks like this eschews the seperate controller entirely and instead uses ESP32 PSRAM for the framebuffer and has the driving waveforms embedded in the MCU firmware etc. Very neat, also one further level of "go deeper", would love to try one!
Additional benefit is that they're quick to refresh, if you have an application that requires it. I have a calculator built with it, works perfectly.
You might want to check out Kagi to summarize articles: https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum. It does the heavy lifting of producing nice outputs for you.
https://github.com/eikehein/hyelicht <- I get a little obsessive with that when documenting/releasing DIY stuff ... :-)
https://imgur.com/a/PqkhdGd (edit: corrected link to album with finished pics)
This is using an IT8951 EPD controller I wrote a little Rust driver for, which indeed talks SPI, although its SPI frontend is really a quirky/leaky abstraction over an I80 interface so you have to e.g. do chip select using I80 semantics and send preambles and such. Still, pretty breezy overall.
Can confirm the power draw is of course "bursty" during the update. Also, yes, e-ink refresh times get slower in colder temps. e-ink refresh also works poorly in direct sunlight. The displays can also "dry out" from it and it can cause artifacts. But the envelope for normal operation is overall fairly good, certainly for home/indoor use.
There's a fair amount of manufacturing tolerance and during testing manufacturers will usually record preferred drive voltages for the individual unit, etc. It's quite important to configure software to make use this information for optimal performance.
I'm hoping it will run for about a year without recharging from that little 1100 mAh LiPo pouch at one update a day (the newspaper is rendered on a common home server RasPi using LuaLaTeX+Ghostscript and then retrieved over Wifi), having taken self-discharge into account.