Most ESP32-S3 audio dev boards ship with dual microphones, but Makerfabs is doubling that count on its latest MaTouch board, pairing a four-microphone array with a 19.1 cm (7.5-inch) quad-color E-Ink display. The combination is designed for voice-controlled, low-power dashboards and information displays, and the included example firmware already demonstrates spoken commands like "show next picture" to browse BMP images stored on a microSD card.

The electrophoretic panel renders in black, white, red, and yellow at 800 x 480 resolution with an active area of 163.2 x 97.92 mm (6.4 x 3.9 inches), driven by a JD79665 controller over SPI. Full-screen refreshes clock in at roughly 20 seconds, which is typical for multi-color E-Ink panels operating in the four-pigment mode. Makerfabs skipped the touch layer entirely, instead routing user interaction through the ES7210-based mic array, which supports far-field voice pickup, beamforming, and direction-of-arrival processing.

The ESP32-S3R8 at the core runs dual Xtensa LX7 cores at 240 MHz with 8 MB of PSRAM and 16 MB of SPI flash, plus 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5 LE. A QMI8658A six-axis IMU provides accelerometer and gyroscope data for orientation sensing. The board also exposes a microSD slot, USB Type-C with native USB, and a LiPo battery connector with onboard charging. An optional 3-megapixel OV3660 camera module can capture images and dither them down to the four-color palette for display on the E-Ink panel.

The ESP32-S3's vector instruction extensions make it a capable platform for on-device signal processing, and the growing ecosystem of local voice assistant projects built on ESP-IDF suggests this board could serve as more than a simple signage controller. Firmware development is supported through ESP-IDF 5.4.2 and the Arduino framework, and Makerfabs publishes the example code, schematics, and hardware documentation for this board in a dedicated GitHub repository, giving developers a starting point beyond the wiki walkthrough. The MaTouch ESP32-S3 7.5-inch Quad-Color E-Ink is in stock now at $60 (€55), with the camera-equipped version at $65 (€60).