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E-paper displays need microsecond-accurate electrical pulses to move ink particles. This is the story of how the ESP32 RMT peripheral generates those pulses, and what broke when Espressif rewrote the driver API.

A single malformed UTF-8 byte froze an entire e-ink display. No crash, no error — just an infinite loop. This is the story of how a bare continuation byte exposed a parser bug in embedded firmware.

From 128 characters in the 1960s to every writing system on Earth. The history of text encoding, why UTF-8 won the internet, and what happens between bytes and the pixels you read.