Week Five Status Report

Let’s sparkle! This week brings another exciting software update for Inkplate 13SPECTRA.

We’ve added Sparkle support to the Arduino library. Sparkle is the Spectra 6 equivalent of "partial update". That means you no longer need to refresh the entire display when only a small part of the screen changes. Instead, you can refresh just the area that was updated, which makes animations and small UI changes much smoother and far easier on the eyes.

With the new partial update support, you can target a specific, rectangular region of the display:

display.displayPartial(x, y, w, h, true);

That means if only one box, widget, or section of your interface changes, you can refresh exactly that rectangle instead of performing a full-screen refresh.

The example code demonstrates this by dividing the screen into a grid of 200x200 pixel squares. First, it fills the entire display with colored blocks and performs a full refresh. After that, it randomly selects one square, changes its color in the framebuffer, and then refreshes only that square using displayPartial().

This opens the door for more efficient interfaces on Inkplate 13SPECTRA, such as dashboards, status panels, counters, notifications, and other layouts where only a small section needs to change at a time. We’re really happy we could implement it in the Arduino library!

Thank you for following our campaign! Stay tuned for even more news!