Papercast''s E-Paper Displays have gone from bus stops to the most competitive sailing challenge on the planet.

Papercast, the leader in solar powered e-paper bus stop displays, recently announced that it delivered breakthrough technology to provide data onboard INEOS TEAM UK’s America’s Cup challenger.

The displays will deliver data to the crew on the ‘AC75’ race boats − 75-foot hydrofoiling mono-hulls designed to bring the America’s Cup home to Britain. An essential element of this technology: the lightweight, waterproof and super robust enclosure produced by Beechcraft.

The design brief was demanding, and different to the needs of Papercast’s normal public transport customers. The display needed to be compact, lightweight, waterproof and extremely robust to survive the crowded, high speed and high energy environment of an Americas Cup cockpit.

The America’s Cup is ultimately a design and technology race and the INEOS TEAM UK race boat is a miracle of engineering − allowing it to fly above the water at speeds in excess of 50mph. The technical complexity of the boat means that a lot of information from the boat’s instrument system and hundreds of sensors needs to be instantly delivered to the crew to keep the boat flying flat and fast.

James Sirmon, Chief Engineer at Papercast: “We needed an enclosure to meet the demands of the AC75, with a fast turnaround. Beechcraft delivered the exact specifications within the timeframe. From our 3D designs they created the tooling, and manufactured a prototype for field testing before being put into production. The experience was seamless and incredibly efficient”.

The result is a display that is easy to read with excellent power efficiency. It is light but incredibly robust and completely configurable by the team’s software engineers. This means that every crew position on the boat could have exactly the data they wanted in a bespoke display.