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The killer application for these e-ink dispalys is calendar/todo list display. I'd love to have my org-mode agenda and todo-list/notes on such a low-powered, lo

• julianlam 4y ago
  I actually repurposed an old Kindle to do just that, via kindle-dash[0] Every 15 minutes it makes a cURL to an endpoint that gets my agenda, some news headlines, the weather, etc., and uses Puppeteer (I think) to return an image for the kindle to display. [0] https://github.com/pascalw/kindle-dash https://github.com/pascalw/kindle-dash
  • 650REDHAIR 4y ago
    This is a neat project! Thanks for the inspiration!
  • godelski 4y ago
    This is exactly what I need! Do you know if it works on a paperwhite? If not, no worries, I know I can find old kindles.
    • PascalW 4y ago
      I've personally only tested it with a Kindle 4 NT. I haven't had any reports of people using this on other Kindle devices, but in theory it should work as long as the device is jailbroken.
  • yownie 4y ago
    I had no idea this existed but was off writing something similar as well. Glad to see a public project repurposing old hardware. I think there's a large potential userbase if PW support eventually get's added.
• jareklupinski 4y ago
  I made a small gadget that displays a count down until your next appointment: https://github.com/jareklupinski/count-down https://github.com/jareklupinski/count-down The hardest part was getting the actual calendar data from Google. I'm not sure there's even a way to actually get my iCalendar from my iPhone :(
  • JKCalhoun 4y ago
    I was only able to get it to work if I made a public calendar on the iPhone. Great.
  • chefandy 4y ago
    Can you have local only calendars on iPhone? If it's the iCloud account, I'm pretty sure it's straight up CalDAV.
  • worthless-trash 4y ago
    Google calendar has live export as ics file, parsable by any ... standard calendar tooling.
  • projektfu 4y ago
    You can set a Google calendar as the default calendar. I'm not sure what happens when icloud users share items with you though.
• HappyTypist 4y ago
  Is there really great marketplace demand? The hacker/hobbyist community is tiny.
  • squarefoot 4y ago
    For what is worth my opinion, I wouldn't get one even if it was free. The first data I look for when I read these enthusiastic reports of color e-paper screen is the refresh rate, and every single time the results are discouraging: 15 seconds for refreshing a page make the product nearly useless for almost all purposes except maybe calendars, but the inferior graphics quality and higher cost make them a lot less appealing than for example using a normal LED screen plus a PIR sensor that turns it off and sends the CPU to sleep when nobody is around to save power. I think the technology just isn't there yet, and will probably need a long time before it becomes interesting for practical uses beyond tinkering and research.
    • cal85 4y ago
      I agree, and it’s frustrating how refresh rate is often buried in the specs. If you haven’t seen it, here [0] is a monochrome e-ink monitor that you can actually watch videos on, just about. For working with documents it looks totally viable. It seems they are only available in China though. [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=iMA8masxYco https://youtube.com/watch?v=iMA8masxYco (skip to 13:30 to see e-ink video playback)
      • squarefoot 4y ago
        Very interesting product, thanks for the link; might be a godsend for long text sessions (coders, writers, journalists, etc). Price still high for most potential users however.
• OberstKrueger 4y ago
  Where is it clear that there is great market demand? The only time I see devices like this discussed is in the small maker community. And the technology limitation of not being a fast updating display limits it to more niche uses.
  • hypertele-Xii 4y ago
    Half of all supermarkets in Finland have e-ink screens for product price tags along shelves. It saves tons of printing. In a country full of trees. Must be great value.
    • blacksmith_tb 4y ago
      I think the primary savings of e-ink pricetags is in labor, not materials. Being able to just send price changes directly to the shelf without having humans go through and change them out is a big deal, so to speak.
      • tedivm 4y ago
        Automatic pricing updates on shelving displays have been around for awhile, eink versions have gotten more popular because they use so much less power. That combined with low power bluetooth has made it even easier to roll them out.
      • cardanome 4y ago
        Also less error prone and more importantly much faster. Being able to update prices in near real time would also potentially allow for more efficiency in setting prices, meaning you can set them in real time. With real time stock information, you could handle sudden demand spikes much more gracefully. Have you prices automatically adjusted between an minimum and maximum price based on current stock and demand. Basically get you targeted stock turnover for the best possible price. (Best coupled with a self-checkout system so the customer consents to the current price). Not that any supermarket I know of is currently smart enough to do that but they could. With all the hoarding due to shortages I could see them smartening up one day.
• m_ke 4y ago
  Yeah I just saw this tidbyt display on the verge and was looking for a way to make something similar with eink. (https://tidbyt.com/ https://tidbyt.com/).
• odysseus 4y ago
  I use an old iPad via Universal Control for exactly this purpose: calendar/to-do list. It sits under my monitor and frees up a lot of screen real estate.
  • 650REDHAIR 4y ago
    Did you have to do anything to make universal control work? I guess I just assumed that since it was a new feature all of my old Apple products wouldn't work (like my 2012 Mac mini that runs a family dashboard doesn't work with UC).
    • odysseus 4y ago
      It just worked for me. But I don’t have any gear older than 2015. Here are the device requirements: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212757 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212757 Looks like you need a Mac from 2015 or newer and an iPad from the same year. Depends on the model though. Similar to Sidecar, I think it depends on video encoding/decoding features introduced in Skylake chipsets, along with some newer version of Bluetooth. There might be some hacky stuff you can do to get it to run, but I wouldn’t expect good performance or reliability. You could always run the iPad with calendar/reminders in split screen with no Universal Control - if you have a gorilla arm.
• bsder 4y ago
  I'm not convinced there is a large demand for these. While LCDs work poorly in bright sunlight, e-ink works poorly in darkness. Humans are more likely using a display in a poorly lit area than a brightly lit one. In addition, e-ink uses less energy only if the image isn't really changing. If the image is refreshing, there is a bunch of energy being blown to overwrite the old image. That's not power friendly. Finally, I seem to remember that there were a bunch of patents in the way.
  • TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    > e-ink works poorly in darkness Exactly why I’ve bought many kindle fires over the years but not a single kindle e-ink reader
    • zoul 4y ago
      The backlight on e-ink Kindles works just fine.
      • TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
        Never knew it had a backlight!
        • locusofself 4y ago
          they are lit from the sides with LEDs. I've heard it referred to as "front light", they aren't backlit.
        • seized 4y ago
          It's been standard for quite a few years now. Not a huge hit in battery life either.
      • adhesive_wombat 4y ago
        Some of them can change warmth as well (at least on Kobo) which is a cute feature.
  • 4y ago
• mandmandam 4y ago
  The last I saw, it is indeed a complex patent and licensing issue. I don't have the source for that handy, but since you seem to be getting many answers blaming the market I figured I'd chime in.
  • robinsoh 4y ago
    > The last I saw, it is indeed a complex patent and licensing issue. What do you mean by "last I saw"? You are working in the display industry?
    • mandmandam 4y ago
      I mean, I read a rather detailed comment on here a few years back from someone actually in the industry, lamenting the stranglehold a particular company was inflicting on innovation. I actually found the particular comment this morning, pasted in full below from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143779 dated Feb 2021 : Edit: And looking closely at that comment chain, I see you were there, questioning the patent stagnation narrative back then also. I guess you're consistent anyway. Edit 2: Man, you have asked this question a lot. And people have given you some very detailed answers, which you never seem to respond constructively to. Care to comment on this? ... Throaway to not get sued. E-ink, the company, holds the patents of the pigment core tech that makes "paper-like" displays possible and strongarms the display manufacturers and the users of their displays to absolute silence. Any research project or startup that comes up with a better alternative technology gets bought out or buried by their lawyers ASAP. E-ink don't make the display themselves, they make the e-ink film, filled with their patented pigment particles and sell it to display manufacturers who package the film in glass and a TFT layer and add a driver interface chip, all of which are proprietary AF and unless you're the size of Amazon, forget about getting any detailed datasheets about how to correctly drive their displays to get sharp images. In my previous company we had to reverse engineer their waveforms in order to build usable products even though we were buying quite a lot of displays. With so much control over the IP and the entire supply chain and due to the broken nature of the patent system, they're an absolute monopoly and have no incentive to lower prices or to bring any innovations to the market and are a textbook example of what happens to technology when there is zero competition. So, when you see the high prices of e-paper gadgets, don't blame the manufacturers, as they're not price gouging, blame E-ink, as their displays make up the bulk of the BOM. Tough, some of their tech is pretty dope. One day E-ink sent over a 32" 1440p prototype panel with 32 shades of B&W to show off. My God, was the picture gorgeous and sharp. I would have loved to have it as a PC monitor so I tried building an HDMI interface controller for it with an FPGA but failed due to a lack of time and documentation. Shame, although not a big loss as an estimated cost for that was near the five figure ballpark and the current consumption was astronomical, sometimes triggering the protection of the power supply on certain images.
• thrown_22 4y ago
  People aren't willing to pay to emerging technology. You can easily buy a 25 inch eink black and white screen for around two years now. Every time I've seen it posted here it's someone asking why it doesn't cost $100. Mean while I'm very happy with the $4k I spent to get one of the first models they build.
  • Aeolun 4y ago
    > Mean while I'm very happy with the $4k I spent to get one of the first models they build. Probably also a factor of how much disposable income one has.
• jrockway 4y ago
  I am not sure "org-mode" and "great market demand" typically refer to the same product. If you think there's great market demand, you should put up a Kickstarter for one of these things. battery + esp32 + readily-available display + some protocol to sync Emacs and your display. You can prototype it in a weekend, and cash in on the demand.
  • swores 4y ago
    On the one hand, in this case I don't agree with the person you replied to who thinks there would be great market demand for this (at least at the price points currently possible). On the other hand... there are plenty of things in the world which could have lots of demand for if they were sold, or if they were invented and then sold, quite often I think of something, or see someone else's idea, where I think that's the case. But even if I were the most entrepreneurial entrepreneur imaginable, I couldn't start a business around every single thing I form an opinion on it having the potential to succeed. Acting as if someone must be willing (and knowledgable enough both about how to make the thing in question and how to market it to get kickstarter traction etc etc) otherwise their opinion that it has a potential market fit is somehow invalid, just feels... mean spirited.
  • m01 4y ago
    > battery + esp32 + readily-available display Here you go (out of stock though): https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/inky-frame-5-7?variant=40057850331219 https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/inky-frame-5-7?variant=40... It uses the raspberry pi pico w instead of an esp32 but close enough? Opinions my own.
    • jrockway 4y ago
      Yup, that's exactly what OP wants. You write some software to fetch the calendar / org-mode entries, and there's your prototype for the Kickstarter. Like all hardware projects, the tough part is the software and the marketing. The software honestly feels like a day's worth of work. I don't know if TinyGo has a driver for the Pico W wifi chip, but I've used an ESP32 with nina and you basically initialize the WiFi core and then use net/http like a program running on a big computer. Very very easy. Times have never been better for Internet-connected microcontroller programmers.