4 ms·

It's bonkers to me how the whole hardware/software world seems to miss the actual best feature of e-ink: it's visible in sunlight. It chaps my ass every day tha

by 23B1 3y ago

It's bonkers to me how the whole hardware/software world seems to miss the actual best feature of e-ink: it's visible in sunlight. It chaps my ass every day that it's only possible to sit in a semi-dark room if for my working hours – during the day no less! YES I am aware there are ways to hook an e-ink screen to my laptop. But that's such a kludge! How is it that there are so few options, how is it nobody is thinking about the health benefits of knowledge workers being able to spend half their day in the sun? Sorry for the rant, it's just big tech brain that very few product developers think in this way. Humans are meant to be outside in the fresh air and sunshine, not locked to a damn screen all day.

kylebenzle 3y ago
We have the technology we have, there is no conspiracy to keep e-ink down other than a conspiracy of dunces.
MichaelZuo 3y ago
If you believe in it, then start your own company and make it? Your on HN after all.
alcover 3y ago
That is my dream too. I would be SO happy to sit outside and think and code for many hours without worrying on battery life. No need for a powerful CPU. I just need to edit my code, see if it works and take notes. I want to hack on my compiler while the cows graze around me !
- paulmd 3y ago
  yes, I've been thinking about this too, and I've talked to other people who have had the same fever dream. the children yearn for the dumb terminal. this isn't a hardware product (people here have mentioned an e-ink tablet that can sideload, that plus a keyboard plus a battery, or ESP32-S3 etc) but rather a software product. and that software is the glorious resurrection of vt320/vt330 buffered/paged terminals. because that's what's going to minimize your terminal's power consumption. you need to brutally minimize the number of bytes you transmit, which means having relatively small working set for any assist features (eg things like debugging might be nicer with a local variable cache). A large persistent eMMC or flash storage (but optimized for doing some decent writes) might be nice for those things. 32GB or 64GB goes a long way in a dumb-terminal context, you can use that like a portion of your RAM load if you code carefully. btle can do some active data transmission in realtime and it has the basic "beacon, I'm still here" etc, and you can use the notification-push thing for server-side async ops. And ideally you'd use your phone as a BTLE client that routes packets/data or provides your server-side api. This can be done even on apple with the Bluetooth Browser thingy, your self-hosted website can interact with your BT device and that'll be your relay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_Low_Energy#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_Low_Energy#Applicati... in an interactive scenario with an IDE-ish thing and a larger working set maybe you use more power but if you're running a nano/pico clone onboard that's dirt simple and can be done with simple buffer flush etc. And most of the ESP32-S3s come with 8MB of external SRAM. The other major power draw is the USB, I think you could bring that down a lot with an actual hardware circuit wired right to the ESP32. Again like, the e-ink tablet with an external KB is simple and lets you get tinkering with the editing experience in that kind of form factor! but I also think you can cut power way below that if you use something like the ESP32-S3 and BTLE with aggressive onboard caching. Don't forget to minimize power in idledown mode, and idledown as aggressively as possible. Running the keyboard as an interrupt-driven thing could cut power a lot if you can idle down between keypresses.
  - phil294 3y ago
    Interesting thoughts, even though I don't understand half of it. But really, check out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28432921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28432921
    - paulmd 3y ago
      This is a 100% head-on match for my thesis here. Thanks!
- soultrees 3y ago
  To be honest, that’s kind of what I already do. MacBook Air with a portable battery gives me about 12 hours. I live in BC so I’ll grab a coffee, drive up the mountain where I can get cell service (not needed in all cases) and just code away until I run out of battery, coffee or energy. The future is here.
jlokier 3y ago
Surprisingly, some laptop LCDs work fine for software development in bright sunlight outdoors. They switch to reflective mode so don't depend on the backlight. My old laptop had one, and it wasn't even an advertised feature. More detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37063449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37063449

by 23B1 3y ago

kylebenzle 3y ago

We have the technology we have, there is no conspiracy to keep e-ink down other than a conspiracy of dunces.

MichaelZuo 3y ago

If you believe in it, then start your own company and make it? Your on HN after all.

alcover 3y ago

That is my dream too. I would be SO happy to sit outside and think and code for many hours without worrying on battery life. No need for a powerful CPU. I just need to edit my code, see if it works and take notes. I want to hack on my compiler while the cows graze around me !

paulmd 3y ago
yes, I've been thinking about this too, and I've talked to other people who have had the same fever dream. the children yearn for the dumb terminal. this isn't a hardware product (people here have mentioned an e-ink tablet that can sideload, that plus a keyboard plus a battery, or ESP32-S3 etc) but rather a software product. and that software is the glorious resurrection of vt320/vt330 buffered/paged terminals. because that's what's going to minimize your terminal's power consumption. you need to brutally minimize the number of bytes you transmit, which means having relatively small working set for any assist features (eg things like debugging might be nicer with a local variable cache). A large persistent eMMC or flash storage (but optimized for doing some decent writes) might be nice for those things. 32GB or 64GB goes a long way in a dumb-terminal context, you can use that like a portion of your RAM load if you code carefully. btle can do some active data transmission in realtime and it has the basic "beacon, I'm still here" etc, and you can use the notification-push thing for server-side async ops. And ideally you'd use your phone as a BTLE client that routes packets/data or provides your server-side api. This can be done even on apple with the Bluetooth Browser thingy, your self-hosted website can interact with your BT device and that'll be your relay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_Low_Energy#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_Low_Energy#Applicati... in an interactive scenario with an IDE-ish thing and a larger working set maybe you use more power but if you're running a nano/pico clone onboard that's dirt simple and can be done with simple buffer flush etc. And most of the ESP32-S3s come with 8MB of external SRAM. The other major power draw is the USB, I think you could bring that down a lot with an actual hardware circuit wired right to the ESP32. Again like, the e-ink tablet with an external KB is simple and lets you get tinkering with the editing experience in that kind of form factor! but I also think you can cut power way below that if you use something like the ESP32-S3 and BTLE with aggressive onboard caching. Don't forget to minimize power in idledown mode, and idledown as aggressively as possible. Running the keyboard as an interrupt-driven thing could cut power a lot if you can idle down between keypresses.
- phil294 3y ago
  Interesting thoughts, even though I don't understand half of it. But really, check out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28432921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28432921
  - paulmd 3y ago
    This is a 100% head-on match for my thesis here. Thanks!
soultrees 3y ago
To be honest, that’s kind of what I already do. MacBook Air with a portable battery gives me about 12 hours. I live in BC so I’ll grab a coffee, drive up the mountain where I can get cell service (not needed in all cases) and just code away until I run out of battery, coffee or energy. The future is here.

jlokier 3y ago

Surprisingly, some laptop LCDs work fine for software development in bright sunlight outdoors. They switch to reflective mode so don't depend on the backlight. My old laptop had one, and it wasn't even an advertised feature. More detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37063449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37063449