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Hey HN, I'm the project lead at EI2030, and we are working on building an open-source eink laptop. From the day-to-day conversations with community members fro

Hey HN, I'm the project lead at EI2030, and we are working on building an open-source eink laptop. From the day-to-day conversations with community members from EI2030, we've identified some challenges with building an eink laptop. We've decided to write an article to introduce EI2030, discuss the challenges of building an open-source eink laptop, and hear from others. If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, please feel free to reach out.

mntmn 6y ago
Hi, I'm the project lead of MNT Reform, an open hardware laptop that just started shipping (link: https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/reform https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/reform)! We would be interested in an e-Ink experiment. During the initial prototyping this was one of the options we considered, but back then it would have been prohibitively expensive and we decided to focus on an IPS display and to get to ship a viable product as quickly as possible -- with a tiny team. Adapting an e-Ink display to MNT Reform would mostly be about designing/adapting the screen housing and introducing a signal path to an e-Ink driver: options could be MIPI-DSI, eDP, USB, or SPI, for example. Edit: My email is lukas@mntre.com if you want to get in touch directly. We also have a community over here: https://community.mnt.re/ https://community.mnt.re/
- baybal2 6y ago
  Wow, such people here. Hello Lukas, I will say MNT reform was probably the best shot at "artisanal laptop" I've ever seen. It's a good, good balance on ones ambitions, and reasonable expectations of what a small team can manufacture, while still feeling very unique, and original.
- alex-a-soto 6y ago
  Hey Lukas, Thank you for your comment and for reaching out. I'm a big fan of MNT Reform, and it's great to hear of your interest in doing an e-ink experiment. We are interested. I'll send you an email later today to talk further.
  - ryukafalz 6y ago
    This is awesome! As someone with a Reform on the way, I'd be very interested in a conversion kit to install a daylight-readable display. :)
- drewzero1 6y ago
  I just want to say that I love your work! I have been following on Mastodon and watching the MNT Reform project with considerable interest, and the possibility of an E-Ink option really helps sweeten the pot. At this point I'm pretty certain I want my next new laptop to be a Reform.
  - tyler109 6y ago
    +1
marcodiego 6y ago
What I'd love: a common chassis that includes: - Some usb devices: keyboard, touchpad, camera and internal usb hub for additional devices and external ports. - HDMI screen with amplified speakers. - Battery charger and internal power source for internal devices. - Internal space for HD, SSD, eMMC, WiFi antenna adapter and most common ARM SBCs. This would allow me to buy a cheap ARM SBC and "build" my own laptop. Except for the battery and internal hub, CrowPi2 is almost like that[0] but CrowPi2 is a toy. We need something that is a tad better than CrowPi2 and not a toy. [0] https://www.elecrow.com/crowpi2-raspberry-pi-portable-laptop.html https://www.elecrow.com/crowpi2-raspberry-pi-portable-laptop...
- mntmn 6y ago
  I am thinking to adopt a SOM standard like Qseven or COMExpress etc. in the (a bit more far) future. What do you think about that? SBCs are not really a good fit for laptops in my opinion because you have to adapt everything with individual cables that are meant for external use. And: are there any SBCs you would like to use except for the Raspberry Pi?
  - marcodiego 6y ago
    >What do you think about that? I understand that the Raspi form factor is not the most adequate for a laptop, but it is a very common form factor. Anything else doesn't even comes close to its popularity. So I think we have to adopt what we have. The only other possibility I can think of is the 96boards standard. >SBCs are not really a good fit for laptops in my opinion because you have to adapt everything with individual cables that are meant for external use The CrowPi2 seems to work well around that. Never seen one personally but it seems good enough for me. >are there any SBCs you would like to use except for the Raspberry Pi? Yes. I want to use a Rock-Pi-4. AFAIK it is the only ARM SBC that is 100% functional without any proprietary blob.
    - jbotz 6y ago
      I think the same is true for the Rock64 from Pine64 and the Libre Computer Board ROC-RK3328-CC. And probably others based on the Rockchip SOCs.
baybal2 6y ago
I feel the project outline is very idealised, without any much regard to how manufacturing will be done. Massive component shortages are a life, and death matter for small companies now, and it's not only about IC shortage. What we had in the industry for last 5-6 year is a chronic shortages, and interruptions of supplies of passives for example. Redesigning entire power supply circuit, and re-layouting the PCB because one can't find a high spec capacitor? Happened many times on my watch. Doing design is only like 10% of time one spends to manufacture anything, and because of that it's not rational to obsess over it. For an enthusiast team, just getting anything, even a prototype run coming out of a factory is where 9 out of 10 projects stall. People run out of the financial runway thinking the factory gate being the finish point... and then they get an email like "Please redesign all your design, and do it 1 week or loose the manufacturing time slot"
- rrmm 6y ago
  Yeah,the technical challenge of getting something working usually end up being the easier part. Manufacturing ends up being very difficult: at a small scale, it's super expensive and at a medium to large scale, logistics becomes difficult. At every scale changes to the design (either for enhancements or EOL parts) is expensive. Injection molding dies require significant engineering, setup, and futzing-with to bring to production. More recent innovations in mfr'ing can be helpful (speed up prototyping and lower the cost of spinning molds or dies) but can't completely liberate you from the difficulties. I would love to see stuff like this succeed, but the difficulty can't be underestimated.
- alex-a-soto 6y ago
  Thank you for your feedback. I agree with your points; manufacturing is an essential part of the process that I neglected to include in the article. Thank you for bringing it up. When we are at that stage, I would appreciate your feedback and suggestions.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    Can only tell there is no easy way. Either you have lots of trial, and error yourself, or you pay somebody for a bit less of it, but still nowhere near a complete assurance. An experienced contractor may keep burning your money, but deliver something in the end. If you yourself is not confident in your experience, there is a risk your team just running out of enthusiasm, and patience, if not money without seeing the light in the end of the tunnel.
ddevault 6y ago
Hi Alex! Please, please, please do not use Discord to organize your open source project's community. Open source projects should rely on open source infrastructure. Discord is a proprietary platform, with a proprietary client, using a proprietary protocol, and has no business being involved in FOSS projects. Please consider using IRC or Matrix.
- alex-a-soto 6y ago
  Hi, we are working on setting up a Matrix server with bridges to other platforms. If you have suggestions or experience in this, I would appreciate your support.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    I don't have any specific experience with Matrix to share suggestions from, unfortunately. But that's a good solution! Thanks for looking into it.
  - neolog 6y ago
    Imho, the best chat platform is Zulip. It has channels, named threads, good search, and persistent history. It's also open source. IME, it's way better for communities than Discord, IRC, Slack.
    - initramfs 5y ago
      I've seen Zulip in action and think it's great. I also think Element.io can be helpful (for Matrix)
- zepto 6y ago
  > Open source projects should rely on open source infrastructure. Can you say why?
  - ddevault 6y ago
    It seems tautologically obvious, but I can elaborate anyway. The benefits that led this project to choose an open source approach applies to other domains as well. If they believe in those merits, then they should naturally be apparent in the other systems that they would rely on, such as their collaboration tools. If you want the advantages of open source to proliferate, you have to cast your lot with more open source tools. They're equally suited to the task as, say, Discord. Choosing proprietary tools and platforms can also easily serve to reduce your pool of potential contributors who don't want to use proprietary tools, and especially those who don't want to install proprietary software on their own computers, like the Discord client. Some people simply cannot use something like Discord at all - it has a high hardware requirements floor, poor to mediocre Linux support and completely absent support for systems like BSD, not to mention grave accessibility problems. Only an open protocol enables anyone to build the clients that suit their needs, and are not dependent on the whims of some corporate board of director's determination of your merit (i.e. financial exploitability) as a participant.
hasmanean 6y ago
Is the display fast enough to be used as a laptop? I wonder if using an eink display as a detachable auxiliary display to show static data such as calendars, todo lists, chats and system monitoring would be more useful.
- IshKebab 6y ago
  Dasung makes e-ink monitors and it looks like they can get something like 20 fps, which is pretty good. Probably just enough to use a mouse without going mad. Maybe. https://youtu.be/AeC3LIFTaho?t=208 https://youtu.be/AeC3LIFTaho?t=208
  - Qwertious 6y ago
    Please note that: 1. There is such thing as an e-ink screen that doesn't hold its image (and that the fastest-refreshing screens in R&D are this type). In other words, beware if someone says "this e-ink screen can refresh at 60FPS" as it might have sacrificed its power usage in order to achieve this (those screens are still useful if you only care about eyestrain/sunlight readability though). 2. 'Good Ereader' makes all his money selling the devices he reviews, which is a HUGE conflict of interest, AND HE IS NOT TRANSPARENT ABOUT THIS. Seriously, the dude generally either mentions it at the end of the video/article or not at all. Usually not at all. That's super scummy, and as such you shouldn't trust him or his videos. 3. Note that technically fast-refresh mode isn't getting 20 frames so much as refreshing a fraction of the screen at a time, so you have 10 pixels at 2Hz rather than each pixel refreshing at 20Hz. You could call it an interlaced refresh or dithered refresh, I'm not sure what the exact technical term is. The reason this matters is that we can't actually make electrophoretic pixels refresh any faster and they probably won't ever refresh the same pixel repeatedly at e.g. 60Hz - you're working against physics when you're shaking your ink up and down that fast, and you're talking about at least an order of magnitude more than you're getting right now.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Using a Mobius e-Ink device, a bigger issue is the ghosting. The discussion of RLCD with up to 60 fps refresh is interesting. For console work, the ghosting is acceptable. For full-screen GUI, it would likely become distracting if windows are moved frequently or contain animated graphics. For reading text, the quality of e-Ink displays is excellent. And outdoor visibility is incorrectly discounted in the article. As a standalone display, such as you describe, e-Ink should be quite well suited.
an_opabinia 5y ago
How do you know you are succeeding?
- initramfs 5y ago
  i guess it depends on how you define succeeding:) We reached 210+ Discord members today.

mntmn 6y ago

Hi, I'm the project lead of MNT Reform, an open hardware laptop that just started shipping (link: https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/reform https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/reform)! We would be interested in an e-Ink experiment. During the initial prototyping this was one of the options we considered, but back then it would have been prohibitively expensive and we decided to focus on an IPS display and to get to ship a viable product as quickly as possible -- with a tiny team. Adapting an e-Ink display to MNT Reform would mostly be about designing/adapting the screen housing and introducing a signal path to an e-Ink driver: options could be MIPI-DSI, eDP, USB, or SPI, for example. Edit: My email is lukas@mntre.com if you want to get in touch directly. We also have a community over here: https://community.mnt.re/ https://community.mnt.re/

baybal2 6y ago
Wow, such people here. Hello Lukas, I will say MNT reform was probably the best shot at "artisanal laptop" I've ever seen. It's a good, good balance on ones ambitions, and reasonable expectations of what a small team can manufacture, while still feeling very unique, and original.
alex-a-soto 6y ago
Hey Lukas, Thank you for your comment and for reaching out. I'm a big fan of MNT Reform, and it's great to hear of your interest in doing an e-ink experiment. We are interested. I'll send you an email later today to talk further.
- ryukafalz 6y ago
  This is awesome! As someone with a Reform on the way, I'd be very interested in a conversion kit to install a daylight-readable display. :)
drewzero1 6y ago
I just want to say that I love your work! I have been following on Mastodon and watching the MNT Reform project with considerable interest, and the possibility of an E-Ink option really helps sweeten the pot. At this point I'm pretty certain I want my next new laptop to be a Reform.
- tyler109 6y ago
  +1

marcodiego 6y ago

What I'd love: a common chassis that includes: - Some usb devices: keyboard, touchpad, camera and internal usb hub for additional devices and external ports. - HDMI screen with amplified speakers. - Battery charger and internal power source for internal devices. - Internal space for HD, SSD, eMMC, WiFi antenna adapter and most common ARM SBCs. This would allow me to buy a cheap ARM SBC and "build" my own laptop. Except for the battery and internal hub, CrowPi2 is almost like that[0] but CrowPi2 is a toy. We need something that is a tad better than CrowPi2 and not a toy. [0] https://www.elecrow.com/crowpi2-raspberry-pi-portable-laptop.html https://www.elecrow.com/crowpi2-raspberry-pi-portable-laptop...

mntmn 6y ago
I am thinking to adopt a SOM standard like Qseven or COMExpress etc. in the (a bit more far) future. What do you think about that? SBCs are not really a good fit for laptops in my opinion because you have to adapt everything with individual cables that are meant for external use. And: are there any SBCs you would like to use except for the Raspberry Pi?
- marcodiego 6y ago
  >What do you think about that? I understand that the Raspi form factor is not the most adequate for a laptop, but it is a very common form factor. Anything else doesn't even comes close to its popularity. So I think we have to adopt what we have. The only other possibility I can think of is the 96boards standard. >SBCs are not really a good fit for laptops in my opinion because you have to adapt everything with individual cables that are meant for external use The CrowPi2 seems to work well around that. Never seen one personally but it seems good enough for me. >are there any SBCs you would like to use except for the Raspberry Pi? Yes. I want to use a Rock-Pi-4. AFAIK it is the only ARM SBC that is 100% functional without any proprietary blob.
  - jbotz 6y ago
    I think the same is true for the Rock64 from Pine64 and the Libre Computer Board ROC-RK3328-CC. And probably others based on the Rockchip SOCs.

baybal2 6y ago

I feel the project outline is very idealised, without any much regard to how manufacturing will be done. Massive component shortages are a life, and death matter for small companies now, and it's not only about IC shortage. What we had in the industry for last 5-6 year is a chronic shortages, and interruptions of supplies of passives for example. Redesigning entire power supply circuit, and re-layouting the PCB because one can't find a high spec capacitor? Happened many times on my watch. Doing design is only like 10% of time one spends to manufacture anything, and because of that it's not rational to obsess over it. For an enthusiast team, just getting anything, even a prototype run coming out of a factory is where 9 out of 10 projects stall. People run out of the financial runway thinking the factory gate being the finish point... and then they get an email like "Please redesign all your design, and do it 1 week or loose the manufacturing time slot"

rrmm 6y ago
Yeah,the technical challenge of getting something working usually end up being the easier part. Manufacturing ends up being very difficult: at a small scale, it's super expensive and at a medium to large scale, logistics becomes difficult. At every scale changes to the design (either for enhancements or EOL parts) is expensive. Injection molding dies require significant engineering, setup, and futzing-with to bring to production. More recent innovations in mfr'ing can be helpful (speed up prototyping and lower the cost of spinning molds or dies) but can't completely liberate you from the difficulties. I would love to see stuff like this succeed, but the difficulty can't be underestimated.
alex-a-soto 6y ago
Thank you for your feedback. I agree with your points; manufacturing is an essential part of the process that I neglected to include in the article. Thank you for bringing it up. When we are at that stage, I would appreciate your feedback and suggestions.
- baybal2 6y ago
  Can only tell there is no easy way. Either you have lots of trial, and error yourself, or you pay somebody for a bit less of it, but still nowhere near a complete assurance. An experienced contractor may keep burning your money, but deliver something in the end. If you yourself is not confident in your experience, there is a risk your team just running out of enthusiasm, and patience, if not money without seeing the light in the end of the tunnel.

ddevault 6y ago

Hi Alex! Please, please, please do not use Discord to organize your open source project's community. Open source projects should rely on open source infrastructure. Discord is a proprietary platform, with a proprietary client, using a proprietary protocol, and has no business being involved in FOSS projects. Please consider using IRC or Matrix.

alex-a-soto 6y ago
Hi, we are working on setting up a Matrix server with bridges to other platforms. If you have suggestions or experience in this, I would appreciate your support.
- ddevault 6y ago
  I don't have any specific experience with Matrix to share suggestions from, unfortunately. But that's a good solution! Thanks for looking into it.
- neolog 6y ago
  Imho, the best chat platform is Zulip. It has channels, named threads, good search, and persistent history. It's also open source. IME, it's way better for communities than Discord, IRC, Slack.
  - initramfs 5y ago
    I've seen Zulip in action and think it's great. I also think Element.io can be helpful (for Matrix)
zepto 6y ago
> Open source projects should rely on open source infrastructure. Can you say why?
- ddevault 6y ago
  It seems tautologically obvious, but I can elaborate anyway. The benefits that led this project to choose an open source approach applies to other domains as well. If they believe in those merits, then they should naturally be apparent in the other systems that they would rely on, such as their collaboration tools. If you want the advantages of open source to proliferate, you have to cast your lot with more open source tools. They're equally suited to the task as, say, Discord. Choosing proprietary tools and platforms can also easily serve to reduce your pool of potential contributors who don't want to use proprietary tools, and especially those who don't want to install proprietary software on their own computers, like the Discord client. Some people simply cannot use something like Discord at all - it has a high hardware requirements floor, poor to mediocre Linux support and completely absent support for systems like BSD, not to mention grave accessibility problems. Only an open protocol enables anyone to build the clients that suit their needs, and are not dependent on the whims of some corporate board of director's determination of your merit (i.e. financial exploitability) as a participant.

hasmanean 6y ago

Is the display fast enough to be used as a laptop? I wonder if using an eink display as a detachable auxiliary display to show static data such as calendars, todo lists, chats and system monitoring would be more useful.

IshKebab 6y ago
Dasung makes e-ink monitors and it looks like they can get something like 20 fps, which is pretty good. Probably just enough to use a mouse without going mad. Maybe. https://youtu.be/AeC3LIFTaho?t=208 https://youtu.be/AeC3LIFTaho?t=208
- Qwertious 6y ago
  Please note that: 1. There is such thing as an e-ink screen that doesn't hold its image (and that the fastest-refreshing screens in R&D are this type). In other words, beware if someone says "this e-ink screen can refresh at 60FPS" as it might have sacrificed its power usage in order to achieve this (those screens are still useful if you only care about eyestrain/sunlight readability though). 2. 'Good Ereader' makes all his money selling the devices he reviews, which is a HUGE conflict of interest, AND HE IS NOT TRANSPARENT ABOUT THIS. Seriously, the dude generally either mentions it at the end of the video/article or not at all. Usually not at all. That's super scummy, and as such you shouldn't trust him or his videos. 3. Note that technically fast-refresh mode isn't getting 20 frames so much as refreshing a fraction of the screen at a time, so you have 10 pixels at 2Hz rather than each pixel refreshing at 20Hz. You could call it an interlaced refresh or dithered refresh, I'm not sure what the exact technical term is. The reason this matters is that we can't actually make electrophoretic pixels refresh any faster and they probably won't ever refresh the same pixel repeatedly at e.g. 60Hz - you're working against physics when you're shaking your ink up and down that fast, and you're talking about at least an order of magnitude more than you're getting right now.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Using a Mobius e-Ink device, a bigger issue is the ghosting. The discussion of RLCD with up to 60 fps refresh is interesting. For console work, the ghosting is acceptable. For full-screen GUI, it would likely become distracting if windows are moved frequently or contain animated graphics. For reading text, the quality of e-Ink displays is excellent. And outdoor visibility is incorrectly discounted in the article. As a standalone display, such as you describe, e-Ink should be quite well suited.

an_opabinia 5y ago

How do you know you are succeeding?

initramfs 5y ago
i guess it depends on how you define succeeding:) We reached 210+ Discord members today.