4 ms·

I had one and in a moment of greed sold it :-( What I loved about it was: * Used regular batteries, no charging, easily obtainable, lasts quite a bit * Keyboa

by Jun8 2y ago

I had one and in a moment of greed sold it :-( What I loved about it was: * Used regular batteries, no charging, easily obtainable, lasts quite a bit * Keyboard was awesome * Retro look & feel * Size What I didn't like: * 8 line display is tiny! * Would prefer a bit smaller * Getting data off is a pain (ether are many workarounds but you have to fiddle with it) So, assuming a $200 price point and using the 5x rule of thumb for HW products, BOM should be $40. Problem is eInk displays are kind of expensive. Putting $15-ish for a 7-inch+ display, rest seems bearable doable. (I've never developed a consumer HW product, so these are wild guesses.)

nine_k 2y ago
What's the point of e-ink? I's good when the picture changes once in a few hours, sucks for word processing. A monochrome transreflective LCD (without a backlight) would consume fractions of a milliwatt, can be a high resolution graphical display or character-based display, and would look plenty sharp under direct sunlight. Also widely available and inexpensive. It can't have such a high contrast as e-ink though.
- kragen 2y ago
  typically monochrome transflective lcds consume quite a bit more than fractions of a milliwatt, though it does depend on how big they are. the two-line reflective lcds commonly found on pocket calculators do indeed consume a fraction of a milliwatt, but power consumption scales mostly with display size e-ink is fast enough to be usable for word processing because the updates are small and incremental and, most importantly, can tolerate some ghosting
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  Yeah, best compromise is a single row LCD display for the "live", "editing" line of text and then eInk for the rows of text above. Of course scrolling the eInk is still slow.
  - kragen 2y ago
    the memory-in-pixel lcd is better than that approach in every way except that it's more expensive, there's no grayscale, and the display panels don't come in large sizes

by Jun8 2y ago

nine_k 2y ago

What's the point of e-ink? I's good when the picture changes once in a few hours, sucks for word processing. A monochrome transreflective LCD (without a backlight) would consume fractions of a milliwatt, can be a high resolution graphical display or character-based display, and would look plenty sharp under direct sunlight. Also widely available and inexpensive. It can't have such a high contrast as e-ink though.

kragen 2y ago
typically monochrome transflective lcds consume quite a bit more than fractions of a milliwatt, though it does depend on how big they are. the two-line reflective lcds commonly found on pocket calculators do indeed consume a fraction of a milliwatt, but power consumption scales mostly with display size e-ink is fast enough to be usable for word processing because the updates are small and incremental and, most importantly, can tolerate some ghosting
JKCalhoun 2y ago
Yeah, best compromise is a single row LCD display for the "live", "editing" line of text and then eInk for the rows of text above. Of course scrolling the eInk is still slow.
- kragen 2y ago
  the memory-in-pixel lcd is better than that approach in every way except that it's more expensive, there's no grayscale, and the display panels don't come in large sizes