Enkiplate turns an Inkplate 4TEMPERA e-paper touchscreen into a Japanese flashcard deck that climbs from kana to kanji at 12 new cards a day

The README sums up the whole routine in one line: “Read the card, tap to reveal it, then tell it how you did.” Today’s high and low and your next three calendar events sit above the card. Under it are three big buttons: missed, knew a little, knew.

Peter Hraska (@virpo), who works on product, design and engineering at Slido, built it for the Inkplate 4TEMPERA. Soldered’s spec sheet lists a 3.8-inch, 600-by-600 e-paper touchscreen, an ESP32 with Wi-Fi and a 1,200 mAh battery.

The tablet does very little thinking. A Python service on your Mac draws every card as a finished picture, Japanese type and torn-paper texture included, in eight shades of gray, and sends it over Wi-Fi or USB. “The host renders typography, paper and touch targets into 3-bit frames,” the README says. The device holds up to 16 cards and asks for a refill when six are left.

Losing the connection mid-drill costs nothing. “Answers are saved before advancing and synced with stable IDs,” Hraska writes, and “an interrupted connection keeps your progress.”

The schedule comes from FSRS, the spaced-repetition algorithm Anki’s manual offers as “an alternative to Anki’s legacy SuperMemo 2 (SM-2) algorithm.” Enkiplate aims for 90% retention, the same default Anki’s manual calls “a good balance of retention and workload.” You say the reading out loud (and the meaning, for words and sentences), tap Reveal, and then “grade the weaker part.” Get the meaning of 猫 right but fumble ねこ, and you grade the fumble.

The deck is a curated starter set, 12,000 common entries from the JMdict dictionary and anything you import as JSON. “No generative model or AI subscription is required.” There are fourteen screen designs, with wave washi as the default, and the README’s feature list ends on a short list of what’s missing: “No streaks. No accounts. No push notifications.”

The weather is set to Bratislava for now; moving it means editing two Python files. The bigger unknown is power. The screen stays awake, sleep and over-the-air updates aren’t built yet, and the README says plainly that “battery life has not been measured.”

The split Enkiplate uses, a cheap screen on the desk and a computer on the network doing the drawing, works for a lot more than Japanese. Expect more single-purpose e-paper gadgets built the same way, because the hard parts (fonts, layout, scheduling) all live in ordinary Python on a machine that’s already on.

The catch is that the machine has to stay on. Enkiplate needs its host “awake and reachable for fresh cards,” Windows isn’t supported yet, and the cache holds 16 cards, “not the full dictionary.” The README does note the service “uses standard Linux-compatible Python libraries,” which leaves the door open for a Raspberry Pi in a closet doing the job a Mac does now.

Other Inkplates “need a firmware port,” per the README, which is an open invitation to anyone with a bigger e-paper panel sitting in a drawer.