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Neat! I've been thinking of building something similar to this — a portable Linux machine that has an eInk display and little QWERTY keyboard, in a size that's

Neat! I've been thinking of building something similar to this — a portable Linux machine that has an eInk display and little QWERTY keyboard, in a size that's a just a bit bigger than a smartphone. I've had a spare eInk display laying around for some time now, and it's about ~~5"~~ 3.7" in size, I think. I managed to get it working with a Pi Zero, and wrote a small Python script which captures the desktop, and then compares it to the previous capture, and then updates the bounds of where the capture is different. Somewhat slow with a Pi Zero, but still somewhat usable. I really need to look into the possibility of performing partial refreshes on the display to save it from having to invert the screen every time there is a change. I might try and use a Pi 4/ Pi CM4 to drive the whole thing — I believe the bottleneck mainly lies in sending the data over to the display, which the Pi Zero is unfortunately quite slow at doing. Plus, it would potentially be a bit more powerful/useful with the newer processor found on the Pi 4!

torgoguys 5y ago
Sounds like a neat project. Yes, partial refreshes help a lot, lot, lot! Battery life might end up becoming a problem if you intend for it to run on batteries. Compared to PaperTerm or smartphones, a Pi uses a lot of juice, but it is great for proof-of-concept!
- James-Livesey 5y ago
  Thanks! As you say, the Pi does chew up quite a bit of the battery life, but I hope that usage should last for at least a day or two. I plan to use a 3,000 mAh battery with the thing, which seems to be quite a lot — my Pixel 4 has 2,800 mAh _and_ that doesn't even have an eInk display! For the purposes of my project, I'm not really focused on trying to make the device extremely thin either. Something relatively chunky (like 1-1.5 cm) is sometimes quite nice and welcoming imo. I wrote up my own notes-to-self much like the author of the PaperTerm did, which provides a brief overview of my general ideas: https://github.com/inkySystems/resources https://github.com/inkySystems/resources It's a tiny bit outdated since it has no mention of my idea of using a Pi CM4. I haven't got many publicly-available info about what I've done so far with my board (seeing that it's a side-side-project of mine or something to that effect...) but it's something I'm experimenting with whenever I've got time on my hands!
  - dolmen 5y ago
    Did you notice you are replying to the PaperTerm author himself/herself?

torgoguys 5y ago

Sounds like a neat project. Yes, partial refreshes help a lot, lot, lot! Battery life might end up becoming a problem if you intend for it to run on batteries. Compared to PaperTerm or smartphones, a Pi uses a lot of juice, but it is great for proof-of-concept!

James-Livesey 5y ago
Thanks! As you say, the Pi does chew up quite a bit of the battery life, but I hope that usage should last for at least a day or two. I plan to use a 3,000 mAh battery with the thing, which seems to be quite a lot — my Pixel 4 has 2,800 mAh _and_ that doesn't even have an eInk display! For the purposes of my project, I'm not really focused on trying to make the device extremely thin either. Something relatively chunky (like 1-1.5 cm) is sometimes quite nice and welcoming imo. I wrote up my own notes-to-self much like the author of the PaperTerm did, which provides a brief overview of my general ideas: https://github.com/inkySystems/resources https://github.com/inkySystems/resources It's a tiny bit outdated since it has no mention of my idea of using a Pi CM4. I haven't got many publicly-available info about what I've done so far with my board (seeing that it's a side-side-project of mine or something to that effect...) but it's something I'm experimenting with whenever I've got time on my hands!
- dolmen 5y ago
  Did you notice you are replying to the PaperTerm author himself/herself?