Seeed reTerminal E1004

The Seeed reTerminal E1004 is the big one in the reTerminal E-series: a portrait 13.3" Spectra 6 six-colour panel at 1200×1600, an ESP32-S3 with 8 MB of PSRAM and 32 MB of flash, a microSD slot, a battery, and touch buttons on the bezel plus physical ones on the back. FrameOS runs on it as a full ESP32-S3 frame, rendering and dithering scenes on the device.

Pick the Seeed reTerminal E1004 hardware preset (seeed_reterminal_e1004) when you add the frame. It selects the waveshare.EPD_13in3e panel driver, the E-series SPI bus with the 13.3" panel's second chip select, the 32 MB flash profile and the TF card asset mount. The panel is the same glass as the Waveshare 13.3" (E), with Seeed's own analogue tuning applied by the preset. The preset does not yet map the buttons to scene events.

Why 8 MB is enough

A 1200×1600 RGBA canvas alone would be 7.3 MB - most of this board's PSRAM before a single image is decoded. The ESP32 renderer instead composites into a 16-bit canvas (3.7 MB), reserved once at boot and reused for every render, and the dither carries its own full-precision error rows beside it. Every panel the firmware drives is a dithered e-paper, so the 5/6-bit colour the canvas holds is below what the panel can show - side by side with the old canvas, a photo dithered to Spectra 6 lands the same palette within 0.05% per colour. That is what makes this board render on-device rather than as a thin client.

Setup

1. In the FrameOS backend, create a frame with Flash embedded device.
2. Choose ESP32-S3, select the Seeed reTerminal E1004 preset, and enter your WiFi details.
3. Build the firmware and flash it over USB from the browser - or write the generic release image with Flash latest release and let the backend configure it over the USB console.
4. Install scenes as usual - they sync over WiFi, and the device updates itself over the air.

A full Spectra 6 refresh on a panel this size takes around half a minute, and a heavy scene can take a similar time to render and dither first. Fine for a frame that updates a few times an hour.

Pin map

Status

🟡 Should work, not yet confirmed on real hardware. The 13.3" Spectra 6 driver is confirmed on the Waveshare 13.3E6 board; this terminal has not been reported back yet. Tell us on GitHub or Discord if you try it.