181 ms·
Modos Paper Monitor (2022)
- screechingbagel 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds38T8wVuDg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds38T8wVuDg woah, actually impressive scrolling and video demo
- GorsyGentle 3y agoNo joke, I did a double-take when I saw the video.
- alex-a-soto 3y agoThank you. We have a long way to go, and what's exciting is the idea of creating native e-ink applications.
- ReactiveJelly 3y ago"If your video looks good in 1-bit mono" was really thinking of 8088 Corruption and Bad Apple
- amelius 3y agoThat is impressive. Though personally, I don't see the need for e-ink except perhaps outdoors or in changing environments. Just setting the brightness at a decent value gives a good enough contrast; after all an e-ink display just reflects light so if the ambient lighting is constant you can just adjust your LED panel to that same overall brightness. I think the scrolling issues of e-ink would be a much greater source of eye strain and discomfort. You can also use an off-white color as a background. Like HN does! It gives a similar feel as paper.
- rbanffy 3y ago> you can just adjust your LED panel to that same overall brightness This is the kind of thing I would expect my monitor to do for me (unless I manually override it). Brightness AND color (so, cooler during day, when the sun is shining through the windows, warmer at night, when the lightbulbs try to approximate incandescent lighting).
- amelius 3y agoThis is a great idea. However keep in mind that sun shining through the window, even if natural, can be a source of eye strain too. Strange as it sounds, I prefer the constant lighting of the fluorescent lamps in my office.
- fallat 3y agoI wrote software to at least adjust brightness: https://len.falken.directory/backlight-auto.html https://len.falken.directory/backlight-auto.html If you're lucky, your monitor can be controlled over HDMI or DisplayPort commands. Matching the room brightness is exactly why I wrote it and because I wanted a nearly-dependency-free binary.
- itishappy 3y agoPower usage could be a huge factor. Modern LED/OLED panels can get bright enough to fight the sun, but pay for that. I'd love to see what this thing can do with a mobile processor and a laptop battery. I bet you could get days of battery life.
- amelius 3y agoYes, although people probably want to use a normal monitor when at their office.
- carlosjobim 3y ago> I don't see the need for e-ink except perhaps outdoors or in changing environments. Yes, but that is a huge deal. I consider it one of the biggest life changers that will come for a large part of the population. We've built our lives around the limitations of emissive displays. What if you didn't need to shield out the sun to be able to do office type jobs? What if the boss in the field on a work site could just sit down where they are when he needs to do some computer stuff and be able to show designs to his workers without having to bring all inside a room or go make prints? I think it also depends greatly on where you are. For Europeans, e-ink might not be so interesting, since it's dark and cold there. And when the sun actually shines, they are on holiday anyway. But for places with a lot of sunshine, e-ink will change a lot of things. That might mean we'll have to let go of scrolling as a paradigm. But let's face it: scrolling only became the default because of bad UI choices and lazy designers. Paper moved from scrolls to pages eons ago.
- eternityforest 3y agoMaybe you could put ambient sensors all around the monitor and simulate the effects of lighting on paper? Or you could use the front camera, and you could even have 3D effects, so a real world light could be reflected in shiny stuff on screen, and cast shadows for non-flat content, etc.
- newswasboring 3y agoIn the next demo they should try to play a game which implements dithering. This is the device Return of Obra Dinn was designed for :D.
- alex-a-soto 3y agoThis is amazing; thank you for the suggestion! I've thought turn-based games could work for e-ink, like correspondence chess or other play-by-mail type games.
- dredmorbius 3y agoThat is impressive, though the display seems to be entirely in 1-bit mode, which is going to improve performance (and probably minimise ghosting) considerably. That works for high-contrast content, but tends to fall apart where more subtle shading differences matter. Either greater pixel depth (16 greyscale shades are common), halftoning (surprisingly effective given ~300 dpi resolution) or dithering (somewhat higher quality, avoides Moire effects) would be able to tackle considerably more content well. (Based on my experience with an Onyx MAX Lumi, similarly-sized screen, multiple display options, and a wide range of content.) The article mentions that there is greyscale rendering possible, but that text is first rendered 1-bit, with 1-bit greyscale applied after a few seconds for antialiasing. My experience with high DPI (dots per inch) displays is that antialiasing is far less an issue, both because the individual pixel size is so small and because with a monochrome screen, the reduced resolution of colour displays (where three pixels are required to provide colour for any given region) isn't a factor. Effectively the pixel density of a monochrome display is about 3x greater than an equivalent colour display, based on the same nominal DPI / dot pitch.
- kumarvvr 3y agoAny information on what panel this is using?
- jahsome 3y agoThey're "open hardware", but it's not immediately clear what the panel is. Only a small number of repos in their github and the only e-ink-looking repo is called Glider. https://github.com/Modos-Labs/Glider https://github.com/Modos-Labs/Glider
- alex-a-soto 3y agoWe plan to complete our EPDC by early next year and we'll work on the documentation.
- falcor84 3y agoIt took me a good 5 minutes now to find that EPDC most likely stands for "Electrophoretic Display Controller" (having found no explanation of this on either your site or the github code). Seeing that you guys use this acronym a lot, you might want to fully spell it out somewhere. But anyway, thanks for the awesome work you're doing!
- alex-a-soto 3y agoThank you! The number of times I've had to type 'Electrophoretic Display Controller,' >_< I have nightmares about it. But that's a good suggestion, possibly having a page that details how E Ink works and include the acronym there.
- alex-a-soto 3y agoFor now we are using ED133UT2.
- stavros 3y agoThis is really impressive, well done!
- dang 3y agoRelated: The Modos Paper Monitor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31899012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31899012 - June 2022 (1 comment) The Modos Paper Monitor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31858659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31858659 - June 2022 (82 comments) The Modos Paper Monitor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31837548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31837548 - June 2022 (1 comment) Would You Buy the First Laptop with an E-Paper Screen? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31750028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31750028 - June 2022 (15 comments) The Modos Paper Laptop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31394226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31394226 - May 2022 (224 comments) Modos: The World’s First E-ink Laptop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29929446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29929446 - Jan 2022 (13 comments)
- friend_and_foe 3y agoI would absolutely love to "upgrade" my display on my notebook to e-ink or a paper like backlight free display. The only thing I'd love more is to upgrade it to OLED, basically, I'd like light to not shine in my eyes needlessly.
- throwaway290 3y agoUmmm... OLED very much shines into your eyes though. What's worse, if you don't want it to shine at top brightness it will additionally flicker, because unlike LCD it cannot be directly dimmed without PWM. If it's technically possible none of the OLED panels do it, even in top iphones.
- friend_and_foe 3y agoYeah but at the very least, I can make everything black but what I'm reading. So the only light shining in my eyes is the light I need to see.
- throwaway290 3y agoThat's technically true, if you make it pure black...
- MobiusHorizons 3y agoReally impressive work! A lot of thought has clearly gone into working around constraints in an aesthetically pleasing and functional way. That kind of end to end polish is pretty rare in my experience, but makes a huge difference on the finished product.
- alex-a-soto 3y agoThank you for your kind words. Wenting has led the development of the EPDC. https://twitter.com/zephray_wenting https://twitter.com/zephray_wenting
- kybernetikos 3y agoUnfortunately I can't read that link, it seems to require a log in.
- alex-a-soto 3y agohttps://www.wentingzhang.com/ https://www.wentingzhang.com/
- epilys 3y agoEPDC stands for E-paper display controller, correct? I found the Caster Verilog on your github repo. Are you planning on shipping with all the controller logic on an FPGA? Interesting and cool approach. Is this something that is already commonplace in the display industry? I have seen VGA controllers on (bigger) Xilinxes years ago as demos but I haven't read about it on shipped display-related products.
- alex-a-soto 3y agoElectrophoretic Display Controller. Yes, that is correct. It's one of the methods used. Wenting goes into more detail in 'Basics of driving E-paper displays': https://hackaday.io/project/11537-nekocal-an-e-ink-calendar/log/191001-basics-of-driving-e-paper-displays https://hackaday.io/project/11537-nekocal-an-e-ink-calendar/...
- paradox460 3y agoBoox has been selling an e-paper based screen[1] for a little while now. Would be curious to hear how this compares I've enjoyed my Onyx Boox tablet; it's a little bigger than a A4 sheet of paper, which is perfect for sheet music, which is my primary use case 1: https://shop.boox.com/products/mira https://shop.boox.com/products/mira
- maxweylandt 3y agoI have one and never thought about sheet music. Would you mind sharing a bit about your setup in terms of the apps you use?
- paradox460 3y agoMost of the heavy lifting is done by MobileSheets. I have the e-paper version installed on my tablet, and the android version on my phone. You have to buy them separately; the e-paper one is only for sale on the online shop, but you get an APK and punch in a license key. I do the set management on my phone, and then sync it over to the tablet. Phone's faster UX makes it less cumbersome, but this is mostly for convenience. The sync features are built in, and can be useful for more than just library management; when I'm playing with other horn players who have the app on an iPad or another e-ink display, we can sync it together and have page turns and other features occur automatically across all of us. When performing or practicing, I often have the phone set next to the bigger screen, showing the upcoming page. They are synchronized using the same means as across different players. For page turning, I use either an AirTurn Duo or an AirTurn Quad. The Quad mostly stays at home, with the extra pedals used to control midi playback. MobileSheets has built-in support for the AirTurn, so setup is a breeze. Finally, a decent chunk of the music I get is old sheet music from sheet music libraries; I simply scan them to PDFs. For more modern pieces, or pieces where more work needs to be done (i.e. transposing, rearranging, etc), I use LilyPond. MobileSheets: https://www.zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/ https://www.zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/ AirTurn: https://www.airturn.com/collections/bluetooth-pedals https://www.airturn.com/collections/bluetooth-pedals
- circuit10 3y agoThey do (or at least did) violate the GPL license which might be a reason to consider avoiding them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23735962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23735962
- __mharrison__ 3y agoI have a portable monitor that is very useful when I'm teaching while traveling. I've often thought that an e ink monitor would be a nice forcing function for productivity. Similar to how a Kindle forces me to read rather than get distracted by other apps.
- tobyjsullivan 3y agoThis looks fantastic for a dedicated code/terminal monitor (or spreadsheets). The scroll refresh rate could be a bit disorienting for mouse-scrolling but would be a non-issue for keyboard-based scroll such as in vim.
- bitwize 3y agoIt's gonna cost like $5000 because of all the eink patents, huh. I would LOVE an eink display to help my tired eyes while I'm emacsing. But the patent BS and the high costs make it impractical for me to spend that much scratch at this time.
- alex-a-soto 3y agoNo, the high price of an e-ink device is not due to patents; it has more to do with market size, need, constraints of the device, suitable use cases, and many other socio-economic factors that come into play. With that said, we hope to offer different products at different price ranges.
- foul 3y agoI'm very interested in your knowledge of the eink market, until today I thought it was some kind of cartel.
- Qwertious 3y agoE-ink isn't particularly expensive, only compared to LCDs. And LCDs are cheap because they have massive economy of scale - they sell literally billions of screens per quarter.
- ThinkBeat 3y agoNo price indication? I would like to know how much it will be, before committing to buying one.
- alex-a-soto 3y agoMy apologies. We are still figuring that out. I'll update the website with more details when we get there.
- dredmorbius 3y agoComparably sized and specced tablets and monitors tend to run ~US$800-$1000 currently (Onyx Tab X, Onyx Mira, both 13.3"). The much larger Mira Pro is closer to $1800 (25.3" diagonal). I'd expect something comparable to the 13.3" Onyx products as displays seem to dominate the BOM costs.
- woolion 3y agoInteresting that 'laptop' won the poll. The e-ink screens are quite fragile, and are actually the only device that I have ever broken. Comparatively, my laptop already went through so much abuse that I'm pretty sure would have destroyed a standard laptop equipped with an e-ink screen. Have you already taken that into account and plan for a design that would take that into account? Are the potential buyers aware of it, or would you risk facing backlash because many screens would be inadvertently broken? The demo is impressive. I bought a Mira Pro yesterday so I'm excited to see more options in the space.
- alex-a-soto 3y agoFrom personal experience, carrying around a portable E-Ink monitor, plugging in the cables, and the initial set-up gets tiring. Some tablets are a better choice, but they mainly use Android, which may or may not work for someone, depending on your workflow. I see why people gravitate to a laptop, a portable form factor, or a secondary 'focus' machine; in the end, each option has certain advantages and drawbacks. Yes, we are accounting for abuse and the daily wear and tear in our design.
- dredmorbius 3y agoHaving used tablets with external keyboards (both integrated into cases and freestanding), as well as laptops, my on-the-go preference would be a flyweight laptop with integrated keyboard and e-ink screen. Low battery consumption, universally-readable screen, real keyboard, Linux, and low distractions. Onyx BOOX + Bluetooth keyboard + Termux ... gets me some of the way there, but it's not quite the same, and it's cumbersome to set up. I'd avoid Android if I could. Thing is that a freestanding (and lightweight) display is also quite useful on its own, for reading, and any hybrid design is going to bump weight up a lot, which starts negating comfort of holding that in your hands and reading. Which is to say I'm validating your design and thinking here. Watching with interest.
- alex-a-soto 3y agodredmorbius! Thank you! I'd love to chat over email. I enjoyed reading your post sometime ago about 'E Ink Design Principles'.
- rcarmo 3y agoAdd a little ARM chip, make it run vim, and I'll get two.
- rbanffy 3y agoSame, but Emacs.
- loloquwowndueo 3y agoThen the chip had better have at least 8 MB RAM and at least a bit of swap space ;)
- soderfoo 3y agoThese e-ink projects always grab my attention, I guess it may be the hacker spirit of such endeavors (we did it because we can). While they are neat, I'm left wondering what are some real world use cases, personal or business, where e-ink would be superior?
- IanCal 3y agoI find them a lot nicer to read, they have lower power requirements and work wonderfully when it's bright. I have an e-ink notebook and it's fantastic to take notes with, and I rarely think about charging it. I'm planning to make a passive display showing things for the day near the front door with an inky frame, I messed with kindles for too long and realised I should just buy the right hardware and make the thing. I think the lack of a backlight makes them very nice for passive, low-attention displays. Glowing things are big "LOOK AT ME" visual distractors. The display should be battery powered for a significant time between charging. Weeks/maybe months?
- razemio 3y agoI would really love to have an e-ink based smart home monitor and dynamic switches. That would be a game changer for me. At night my current setup blinds me for a few seconds, even on the lowest setting which is barley readible at daylight. Never had an issue with my old palm and it's passive background light.
- unhammer 3y agoNo-squint outdoor programming
- alex-a-soto 3y agoA lot of the people I've spoken to who are interested in E Ink due to having a physical condition that makes it so they can't use a monitor for extended periods. I've also had people report that they experience challenges focusing on a given task. Others want to use their devices outside or have a minimal, focused computing experience. My perspective has changed recently, and I see it more as a question of accessibility and having control over our devices, user interfaces, and the medium.
- rbanffy 3y agoNow I am imagining a retro-Mac-like computer (after all, Macs started at 1 bit per pixel) with a vertical page display. As for greyscale, with enough pixels, you can do dithering quite well. We used to do that with laser and ink-jet printers (by playing with reticule in PostScript, because the default was not definitely NOT designed for 300 dpi) with decent results. In fact, a step back into monochrome could be a huge opportunity to explore new ideas in UI.
- alex-a-soto 3y agoYes, I and others have considered a more retro feel for the user interface. I mainly want a Symbolics Genera-like interface :)
- guywhocodes 3y agoFramework 13 module would be cool
- alex-a-soto 3y agoHopefully, someday, once we complete our EPDC, I plan to contact the PINE64 community and MNT Reform to see if they would be interested in incorporating it into their devices.
- epilys 3y agoMNT Reform designer is pretty active on Mastodon, you can reach them very easily. https://mastodon.social/@mntmn https://mastodon.social/@mntmn
- throwaway290 3y agoRegarding color, I would be quite interested if they went for CMY.
- convolvatron 3y agodoesn't it seem a bit strange that you have to construct your own differences? I've always wondered why there isn't a video interface that just sends compressed deltas. the number of devices that need to actually scan is pretty small at this point.
- BradDavis67 3y ago[flagged]
- hatsune 3y agoThere is also PineNotes (which is in very early dev stage, but Pine64 makes dev board anyway, already available for ordering) in the market, but from the demo Modos definitely have a lot better display. Maybe it's finally a time for x86 e-ink laptop to strive. Can't wait to take note on that.