5 ms·

Modos Paper Monitor – Open-hardware e-paper monitor and dev kit

331 points by RossBencina 1y ago

ryanckulp 1y ago
we bought a couple of these at TRMNL for testing purposes ;)
- alex-a-soto 1y ago
  Can't wait to see what you have in mind ;)
sandos 1y ago
It seems to update fast, but with significant ghosting, right? Looking at the cat example. Maybe this is just the best e-ink can do, and thats fine!
- swinglock 1y ago
  It looks amazing for e-ink. You'd probably don't want this for video anyway, besides it's not even in color. I'm impressed that it works at all. For a lot of work though it could be amazing, depending on your environment. Say you'd want to pop outside in the nice weather to do some programming. You quickly find why that wasn't as glamorous as you expected. But if you had a laptop with such a screen I would expect it to work great.
  - clueless 1y ago
    this is not the same technology as e-ink, hence why they call it e-paper
    - alex-a-soto 1y ago
      It’s an electrophoretic display, in the category of e-paper, informally called e-ink, made by the company E Ink. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper#Electrophoretic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper#Electrophoret...
  - porridgeraisin 1y ago
    What about syntax highlighting?
    - 3abiton 1y ago
      That indeed would be my issue with it for programming.
    - swinglock 1y ago
      I don't require it myself but that's a concern, it's nice to have. Maybe someone can build an editor that uses different fonts within one file instead of different colors. Could be something out there for color blind folks already, though seeing no colors at all is unusual. But e-ink has grayscales so you could at least make comments a bit lighter, I think I'd be happy with that.
      - balou23 1y ago
        There's plenty of options available. A coworker of mine used to print out code for reviews. You can use italic, bold and underline as alternative to colors. Grayscale might work nicely for eInk too - for laser printers just thin/regular/bold probably works better. Other fonts... I could see myself being distracted by changing fonts in a document, except maybe for comment blocks. But for those italic/thin seems to work well already. Tried to find the tool... it's GNU enscript. Syntax highlighting for several languages, outputs to postscript.
        swinglock 1y ago
        I like your idea better.
        alex-a-soto 1y ago
        I didn’t know about GNU Enscript, going to check it out. Thanks!
      - OJFord 1y ago
        I'd do 3 greys, from lightest to darkest: comments, syntactical cruft like braces, semicolons, certain keywords, etc., and then 'actual' code, variable names and so on. Much more variation than that with 256 colours is mostly just making it pretty rather than offering helpful distinction imo.
- b112 1y ago
  There's a lot better being done by Boox, and even with colour e-ink in terms of ghosting. I think a lot of that is software end, though. The one unfortunate thing is that this monitor seems to have a glossy screen, not matte, but maybe that's an additional layer over a dev kit? If this truly is 'open', then it should be trivial to write special X11/Wayland drivers for it, to handle a lot of the ghosting issues at that end. I think Boox actually refreshes portions of screens, and a double or triple video buffer in X/Wayland could do the same. (One problem with Boox is their relentless phone-home to servers in China, which cannot be disable by normal means.)
  - swinglock 1y ago
    Damn shame, because otherwise they look brilliant, I would have wanted one. Thanks for the warning.
  - dspillett 1y ago
    Another problem with Boox is the disregard of the requirements of the GPL family of licences. I've been interested in some of their devices but won't touch them due to that (and now due to the issue you stated - though I was unaware there was un-disablable “telemetry”, I'd have to look into that if they ever did something about the lack of GPL compliance).
    - DrJaws 1y ago
      they didn't, they even said something like "lol we don't care, we will never make things open source".
  - foolswisdom 1y ago
    Can you tell us more about the phoning home?
    - DrJaws 1y ago
      it's not much different than a samsung device phoning their servers for every thing the device does. but in this case as it does to china, people are a bit paranoid. usually mostly is their cloud services for notetaking or some push notifications. but I think I remember people saying they could disable everything by rooting the devices.
- alex-a-soto 1y ago
  Thanks! Yes, it does update quickly, and ghosting is still an issue, though I think there’s room for improvement on the OS/software side. I gave a talk at the Linux App Summit earlier this year where I shared some ideas for how this could work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7xTs9-2AgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7xTs9-2AgU
  - b112 1y ago
    I think, if you look at Boox and how they have display options and config for each app, you could do this for X11 quite easily. Especially a custom backend video driver which flattens to greyscale, and distinguishes change on a per app basis. An incredibly hacky thing, is that (as an example) Sawfish is an immensely extensible window manager. You can literally drop in lisp code linking actions by tagging on window names, application names, and so on. So you could actually extend sawfish quite easily, and then do what Boox is doing. Change per-window methods of refresh, by interfacing with the backend video driver in X11, and so on. I think a lot of people who don't use Linux, would "put up" with Linux if there was a way to use a framework with a display. So I think, strongly think, that the display of course and your work of course must be done, but that it relies very strongly on slapping together a more holistic environment. Just thoughts. And good luck with this.
    - alex-a-soto 1y ago
      Thank you for your thoughts and support. I agree, doing this in X11 is definitely doable. I’ve seen others achieve similar results by running a daemon that listens for damage regions. I hadn’t considered using a custom backend video driver; that’s something I’ll be looking into. My focus has mostly been on Wayland, but possibly prototyping in X11 could be a starting point. Some people I've met are interested in using computer vision techniques at the hardware level, or making a camera rig. What excites me most is getting this into people’s hands, seeing what they create with it, and working together to improve it and explore new use cases. One use case that I learned about recently: E-Ink News: The mystery of cuttlefish disguise, scientists use E Ink technology to explore its secrets https://www.ereaderpro.co.uk/en/blogs/news/e-ink-news-the-mystery-of-cuttlefish-camouflage-scientists-use-e-ink-technology-to-explore-its-secrets https://www.ereaderpro.co.uk/en/blogs/news/e-ink-news-the-my...
exceptione 1y ago
Being Dutch I am proud to see NLNet and the EU financially supporting this project. We deny ourselves so much progress by forcing smart individuals with a passion into conglomerates that are merely busy destroying competition. Small to medium sized organizations have the biggest potential for innovation, and look what two people even can do.
- RossBencina 1y ago
  Agree, and for those who aren't aware, these grants are available to anyone, not limited to Netherlands residents: https://nlnet.nl/NGI0/ https://nlnet.nl/NGI0/
  - Vinnl 1y ago
    In fact, NGI is funded by the EU - NLNet just happens to be the org doing the handing-out.
- tonyhart7 1y ago
  "EU financially supporting this project." wdym about EU funding this project, I see backer list and there are bunch of US citizen
- rsto 1y ago
  It's an interesting project, but I'm confused why they got funded with EU money. Their company is based in Boston and it looks as both of them are living in them US, which suggests neither of them is European citizen or pays taxes in the EU, which ultimately is where the money for these grants comes from. The funding requirements of NLNet state "it is a knock-out criterion for each project to have a "European dimension [...] where a significant contribution towards the vision of the Next Generation Internet initiative also qualifies". I'm not trying to pick on this particular project, I just found out non-EU projects can apply at all. I hope the majority of NLNet money goes to projects that actually are executed in Europe and build expertise there.
- alex-a-soto 1y ago
  Thank you for your kind words. I agree that small teams can achieve a lot. We’re grateful to NLnet and the EU, whose support made this project possible and especially in overcoming complex challenges. We’ve made a point of attending conferences and sharing what we’ve learned. Now that the project is ready, we can focus on expanding that knowledge and collaborating with people everywhere.
torium 1y ago
Not sure I understand what I'm looking at. At 0:47, which one is the e-ink, left hand side or right hand side? Initially I thought the e-ink was on the left hand side, but it has SO MUCH GLARE. Also on the intro at 0:10 you can see the glare move across as they tilt it. More glare: 0:26 (left) 0:28 (top left). I have an e-ink reader and it has zero glare. I read it on the beach as clearly as paper, I'm not exaggerating. They've done the hardest part (the latency), how don't know how to explain fumbling this badly on the easy part. It shouldn't have glass in front!!
- KolmogorovComp 1y ago
  It’s obviously the left one. I don’t see much glare on it.
  - torium 1y ago
    You don't see the glare on the left hand side? Are you trolling me? https://imgur.com/AsMMNmi https://imgur.com/AsMMNmi https://imgur.com/a/kHBiPmu https://imgur.com/a/kHBiPmu
    - Y_Y 1y ago
      {"data":{"error":"Imgur is temporarily over capacity. Please try again later."},"success":false,"status":403} Pretty sure that's a lie and they just don't like my VPN. Either way, shitty image host.
- technothrasher 1y ago
  Their big claim, at least it seems on quick glance, is in the controller, not the display. You can use any e-ink display with it. The display with glare that you're complaining about I think is just the cheap display they're including in the dev kit.
  - torium 1y ago
    Oh really? I completely missed that. I thought what they were offering was an e-ink display with a latency that's low enough to use as computer screen. It's possible I just can't read.
jzellis 1y ago
This would be absolutely amazing for a productivity device. I've rooted my Kindle Paperwhite and set it up with a terminal and used it to SSH into my laptop just to try it, but the latency makes it a bit irritating just to keep up with typing. To be able to use a fully graphical environment in e-paper, even in grayscale, would be amazing. I built a cyberdeck that primarily uses a pair of XReal AR glasses as its display, but to have the option to use either those or this would be so awesome.
- WillAdams 1y ago
  Even without the advantages of e-ink, a display which one can view _anywhere_ is a compelling thing, which opens up a lot of possibilities --- my favourite Windows device was a Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110 w/ a transflective LCD, which I used as my main computer, e-book reader, notepad (writing/drawing/annotating with a stylus), and map display when traveling. The transflective display eliminated issues regarding reflection or the display getting washed out by even full, bright, direct sunlight (I would use it for reference material for building sand castles at the beach). Unfortunately, transflective LCDs do _not_ showroom well (dim) and no one seemed willing to make the investment to show their capabilities (build a daylight-equivalent light booth on the store floor). I keep eyeing a Daylight Computer, but these days, I just use a Kindle Scribe for reading and note-taking/sketching/reference, and I limit my activities when in full sun to those things which it can do well, changing location/finding shade when I need to do other things.
  - RossBencina 1y ago
    Are you familiar with Sun Vision RLCD displays? They seem to get good reviews. Not cheap though: https://www.sunvisiondisplay.com/ https://www.sunvisiondisplay.com/
    - WillAdams 1y ago
      I wish that someone would use an updated (high-resolution) one to make a battery-powered tablet which uses a Wacom EMR stylus.
  - 1y ago
newsclues 1y ago
Looks like they would be good for Home Assistant dashboards.
- voxadam 1y ago
  Maybe if they supported touch.
  - newsclues 1y ago
    Not really, not everyone likes or wants touch, and the fingerprints on screens. Switches, buttons, sliders and knobs are excellent physical input devices when used properly.
- ajtaylor 1y ago
  That was my very first thought as well. I'm wanting to build a display that can show the status of various things - garage door, temperature, air quality, etc. Ideally it could run on battery too so I could mount it anywhere. Just need to find the time and motivation to do it, among all the other priorities & interests.
Escapade5160 1y ago
Soldered Inkplate is a solid option for anyone wanting a device with Wi-Fi, backlight, touch screen, battery, and runs arduino or micro python. Recently set one up as a display that updates if I'm in a meeting or free that I hang on my office door.
- whamlastxmas 1y ago
  Also shout out to https://usetrmnl.com/ https://usetrmnl.com/ which is much cheaper than OP if all you need is a display that updates every 5+ minutes. The founder is a really cool guy and cares a lot about this project
RossBencina 1y ago
Looks like my post got a second chance. I'm not affiliated with the project, but I am an interested e-ink monitor enthusiast. You may be interested to know that this project is a fully open project, all source code, verilog, algorithm documentation and hardware design files are on github: https://github.com/Modos-Labs/Glider https://github.com/Modos-Labs/Glider https://gitlab.com/zephray/caster https://gitlab.com/zephray/caster
- Forgeties79 1y ago
  I talked to my wife constantly about how badly I want an e-ink monitor, they’re just still so expensive for the specs I want haha. I’d take a solid 24”, maybe 21”, b&w 30hz at this point if the price was right (sub-$500).
  - alex-a-soto 1y ago
    Yeah, to get a 24" e-ink monitor anywhere near that price, we’d need much higher production volumes. Right now, it just isn’t mass-produced enough to bring costs down to the sub-$500 range.
    - Forgeties79 1y ago
      I totally understand the limitations there, i’m just spelling out what I’d like!
    - 4gotunameagain 1y ago
      Since you are really into that stuff, could you please share your opinion about the widely shared view that e-ink remains artificially expensive due to patents ? Or point to reading material you find truthful. Thanks !
- alex-a-soto 1y ago
  Three years ago, I posted about modding a ThinkPad T480 into an e-ink laptop: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26245563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26245563 That turned into a community project and eventually into building our own FPGA-based e-ink display controller to improve refresh speed and reduce ghosting. The result is a dev kit and monitor: open hardware, supports 6–13" monochrome and color e-ink panels over HDMI or USB-C, up to 75 Hz with sub-100 ms latency, and includes a C API. Hardware, firmware, docs and schematics: https://github.com/Modos-Labs/Glider https://github.com/Modos-Labs/Glider
RossBencina 1y ago
The devboard shipped with this kit has USB Type-C DisplayPort and DVI via microHDMI, both provided by off-the-shelf interface ICs. I would love to see a version that can take LVDS from a typical laptop motherboard to allow for modding a laptop (maybe a Framework 13)? The design appears to use a low-end FPGA with fairly modest resource usage, so I suspect it is technically feasible to interface video LVDS direct to the FPGA. I'm not sure about the power requirements however.
- wtallis 1y ago
  The Type-C DP input appears to be using a DP to LVDS converter, so the FPGA is already accepting LVDS, it just doesn't expose a connector for it. But for interfacing with laptops, these days it's eDP that matters, not LVDS. So the issue is mostly the mismatch between an internal eDP connector vs the board's type-C connector.
lemonberry 1y ago
There was a really neat post here from November of last year about a person making an e-ink display for his mother with amnesia. It may be of interest if you like this stuff. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42135520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42135520
perching_aix 1y ago
Really impressed by how fast epaper is these days, but the demo video really doesn't look refresh rate compliant at 60 Hz.
- alex-a-soto 1y ago
  We have some other videos, with more to come this week. Generative Forest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fLYVwh4XCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fLYVwh4XCE Return of the Obra Dinn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClK8lDJWJcw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClK8lDJWJcw
qwertytyyuu 1y ago
75hz woah
arkensaw 1y ago
I'm disappointed by how expensive these things still are. Smartphone size eink panels are so cheap that every supermarket has thousands of them as price display panels. but try and find epaper bigger than 10" and you'll be paying $350+ just for a panel that does nothing by itself.
system2 1y ago
Can't do anything with eink in the USA because of the patents. This is very frustrating.
oojuliuso 1y ago
Why Amazon can't use its economies of scale to build a Kindle monitor that devs and writers would early adopt like wildfire is a strange curiosity.
wkat4242 1y ago
Um that "driver board" has more power than a raspberry pi lol. No wonder it's so expensive

331 points by RossBencina 1y ago

ryanckulp 1y ago

we bought a couple of these at TRMNL for testing purposes ;)

alex-a-soto 1y ago
Can't wait to see what you have in mind ;)

sandos 1y ago

It seems to update fast, but with significant ghosting, right? Looking at the cat example. Maybe this is just the best e-ink can do, and thats fine!

swinglock 1y ago
It looks amazing for e-ink. You'd probably don't want this for video anyway, besides it's not even in color. I'm impressed that it works at all. For a lot of work though it could be amazing, depending on your environment. Say you'd want to pop outside in the nice weather to do some programming. You quickly find why that wasn't as glamorous as you expected. But if you had a laptop with such a screen I would expect it to work great.
- clueless 1y ago
  this is not the same technology as e-ink, hence why they call it e-paper
  - alex-a-soto 1y ago
    It’s an electrophoretic display, in the category of e-paper, informally called e-ink, made by the company E Ink. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper#Electrophoretic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper#Electrophoret...
- porridgeraisin 1y ago
  What about syntax highlighting?
  - 3abiton 1y ago
    That indeed would be my issue with it for programming.
  - swinglock 1y ago
    I don't require it myself but that's a concern, it's nice to have. Maybe someone can build an editor that uses different fonts within one file instead of different colors. Could be something out there for color blind folks already, though seeing no colors at all is unusual. But e-ink has grayscales so you could at least make comments a bit lighter, I think I'd be happy with that.
    - balou23 1y ago
      There's plenty of options available. A coworker of mine used to print out code for reviews. You can use italic, bold and underline as alternative to colors. Grayscale might work nicely for eInk too - for laser printers just thin/regular/bold probably works better. Other fonts... I could see myself being distracted by changing fonts in a document, except maybe for comment blocks. But for those italic/thin seems to work well already. Tried to find the tool... it's GNU enscript. Syntax highlighting for several languages, outputs to postscript.
      - swinglock 1y ago
        I like your idea better.
      - alex-a-soto 1y ago
        I didn’t know about GNU Enscript, going to check it out. Thanks!
    - OJFord 1y ago
      I'd do 3 greys, from lightest to darkest: comments, syntactical cruft like braces, semicolons, certain keywords, etc., and then 'actual' code, variable names and so on. Much more variation than that with 256 colours is mostly just making it pretty rather than offering helpful distinction imo.
b112 1y ago
There's a lot better being done by Boox, and even with colour e-ink in terms of ghosting. I think a lot of that is software end, though. The one unfortunate thing is that this monitor seems to have a glossy screen, not matte, but maybe that's an additional layer over a dev kit? If this truly is 'open', then it should be trivial to write special X11/Wayland drivers for it, to handle a lot of the ghosting issues at that end. I think Boox actually refreshes portions of screens, and a double or triple video buffer in X/Wayland could do the same. (One problem with Boox is their relentless phone-home to servers in China, which cannot be disable by normal means.)
- swinglock 1y ago
  Damn shame, because otherwise they look brilliant, I would have wanted one. Thanks for the warning.
- dspillett 1y ago
  Another problem with Boox is the disregard of the requirements of the GPL family of licences. I've been interested in some of their devices but won't touch them due to that (and now due to the issue you stated - though I was unaware there was un-disablable “telemetry”, I'd have to look into that if they ever did something about the lack of GPL compliance).
  - DrJaws 1y ago
    they didn't, they even said something like "lol we don't care, we will never make things open source".
- foolswisdom 1y ago
  Can you tell us more about the phoning home?
  - DrJaws 1y ago
    it's not much different than a samsung device phoning their servers for every thing the device does. but in this case as it does to china, people are a bit paranoid. usually mostly is their cloud services for notetaking or some push notifications. but I think I remember people saying they could disable everything by rooting the devices.
alex-a-soto 1y ago
Thanks! Yes, it does update quickly, and ghosting is still an issue, though I think there’s room for improvement on the OS/software side. I gave a talk at the Linux App Summit earlier this year where I shared some ideas for how this could work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7xTs9-2AgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7xTs9-2AgU
- b112 1y ago
  I think, if you look at Boox and how they have display options and config for each app, you could do this for X11 quite easily. Especially a custom backend video driver which flattens to greyscale, and distinguishes change on a per app basis. An incredibly hacky thing, is that (as an example) Sawfish is an immensely extensible window manager. You can literally drop in lisp code linking actions by tagging on window names, application names, and so on. So you could actually extend sawfish quite easily, and then do what Boox is doing. Change per-window methods of refresh, by interfacing with the backend video driver in X11, and so on. I think a lot of people who don't use Linux, would "put up" with Linux if there was a way to use a framework with a display. So I think, strongly think, that the display of course and your work of course must be done, but that it relies very strongly on slapping together a more holistic environment. Just thoughts. And good luck with this.
  - alex-a-soto 1y ago
    Thank you for your thoughts and support. I agree, doing this in X11 is definitely doable. I’ve seen others achieve similar results by running a daemon that listens for damage regions. I hadn’t considered using a custom backend video driver; that’s something I’ll be looking into. My focus has mostly been on Wayland, but possibly prototyping in X11 could be a starting point. Some people I've met are interested in using computer vision techniques at the hardware level, or making a camera rig. What excites me most is getting this into people’s hands, seeing what they create with it, and working together to improve it and explore new use cases. One use case that I learned about recently: E-Ink News: The mystery of cuttlefish disguise, scientists use E Ink technology to explore its secrets https://www.ereaderpro.co.uk/en/blogs/news/e-ink-news-the-mystery-of-cuttlefish-camouflage-scientists-use-e-ink-technology-to-explore-its-secrets https://www.ereaderpro.co.uk/en/blogs/news/e-ink-news-the-my...

exceptione 1y ago

Being Dutch I am proud to see NLNet and the EU financially supporting this project. We deny ourselves so much progress by forcing smart individuals with a passion into conglomerates that are merely busy destroying competition. Small to medium sized organizations have the biggest potential for innovation, and look what two people even can do.

RossBencina 1y ago
Agree, and for those who aren't aware, these grants are available to anyone, not limited to Netherlands residents: https://nlnet.nl/NGI0/ https://nlnet.nl/NGI0/
- Vinnl 1y ago
  In fact, NGI is funded by the EU - NLNet just happens to be the org doing the handing-out.
tonyhart7 1y ago
"EU financially supporting this project." wdym about EU funding this project, I see backer list and there are bunch of US citizen
rsto 1y ago
It's an interesting project, but I'm confused why they got funded with EU money. Their company is based in Boston and it looks as both of them are living in them US, which suggests neither of them is European citizen or pays taxes in the EU, which ultimately is where the money for these grants comes from. The funding requirements of NLNet state "it is a knock-out criterion for each project to have a "European dimension [...] where a significant contribution towards the vision of the Next Generation Internet initiative also qualifies". I'm not trying to pick on this particular project, I just found out non-EU projects can apply at all. I hope the majority of NLNet money goes to projects that actually are executed in Europe and build expertise there.
alex-a-soto 1y ago
Thank you for your kind words. I agree that small teams can achieve a lot. We’re grateful to NLnet and the EU, whose support made this project possible and especially in overcoming complex challenges. We’ve made a point of attending conferences and sharing what we’ve learned. Now that the project is ready, we can focus on expanding that knowledge and collaborating with people everywhere.

torium 1y ago

Not sure I understand what I'm looking at. At 0:47, which one is the e-ink, left hand side or right hand side? Initially I thought the e-ink was on the left hand side, but it has SO MUCH GLARE. Also on the intro at 0:10 you can see the glare move across as they tilt it. More glare: 0:26 (left) 0:28 (top left). I have an e-ink reader and it has zero glare. I read it on the beach as clearly as paper, I'm not exaggerating. They've done the hardest part (the latency), how don't know how to explain fumbling this badly on the easy part. It shouldn't have glass in front!!

KolmogorovComp 1y ago
It’s obviously the left one. I don’t see much glare on it.
- torium 1y ago
  You don't see the glare on the left hand side? Are you trolling me? https://imgur.com/AsMMNmi https://imgur.com/AsMMNmi https://imgur.com/a/kHBiPmu https://imgur.com/a/kHBiPmu
  - Y_Y 1y ago
    {"data":{"error":"Imgur is temporarily over capacity. Please try again later."},"success":false,"status":403} Pretty sure that's a lie and they just don't like my VPN. Either way, shitty image host.
technothrasher 1y ago
Their big claim, at least it seems on quick glance, is in the controller, not the display. You can use any e-ink display with it. The display with glare that you're complaining about I think is just the cheap display they're including in the dev kit.
- torium 1y ago
  Oh really? I completely missed that. I thought what they were offering was an e-ink display with a latency that's low enough to use as computer screen. It's possible I just can't read.

jzellis 1y ago

This would be absolutely amazing for a productivity device. I've rooted my Kindle Paperwhite and set it up with a terminal and used it to SSH into my laptop just to try it, but the latency makes it a bit irritating just to keep up with typing. To be able to use a fully graphical environment in e-paper, even in grayscale, would be amazing. I built a cyberdeck that primarily uses a pair of XReal AR glasses as its display, but to have the option to use either those or this would be so awesome.

WillAdams 1y ago
Even without the advantages of e-ink, a display which one can view _anywhere_ is a compelling thing, which opens up a lot of possibilities --- my favourite Windows device was a Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110 w/ a transflective LCD, which I used as my main computer, e-book reader, notepad (writing/drawing/annotating with a stylus), and map display when traveling. The transflective display eliminated issues regarding reflection or the display getting washed out by even full, bright, direct sunlight (I would use it for reference material for building sand castles at the beach). Unfortunately, transflective LCDs do _not_ showroom well (dim) and no one seemed willing to make the investment to show their capabilities (build a daylight-equivalent light booth on the store floor). I keep eyeing a Daylight Computer, but these days, I just use a Kindle Scribe for reading and note-taking/sketching/reference, and I limit my activities when in full sun to those things which it can do well, changing location/finding shade when I need to do other things.
- RossBencina 1y ago
  Are you familiar with Sun Vision RLCD displays? They seem to get good reviews. Not cheap though: https://www.sunvisiondisplay.com/ https://www.sunvisiondisplay.com/
  - WillAdams 1y ago
    I wish that someone would use an updated (high-resolution) one to make a battery-powered tablet which uses a Wacom EMR stylus.
- 1y ago

newsclues 1y ago

Looks like they would be good for Home Assistant dashboards.

voxadam 1y ago
Maybe if they supported touch.
- newsclues 1y ago
  Not really, not everyone likes or wants touch, and the fingerprints on screens. Switches, buttons, sliders and knobs are excellent physical input devices when used properly.
ajtaylor 1y ago
That was my very first thought as well. I'm wanting to build a display that can show the status of various things - garage door, temperature, air quality, etc. Ideally it could run on battery too so I could mount it anywhere. Just need to find the time and motivation to do it, among all the other priorities & interests.

Escapade5160 1y ago

Soldered Inkplate is a solid option for anyone wanting a device with Wi-Fi, backlight, touch screen, battery, and runs arduino or micro python. Recently set one up as a display that updates if I'm in a meeting or free that I hang on my office door.

whamlastxmas 1y ago
Also shout out to https://usetrmnl.com/ https://usetrmnl.com/ which is much cheaper than OP if all you need is a display that updates every 5+ minutes. The founder is a really cool guy and cares a lot about this project

RossBencina 1y ago

Looks like my post got a second chance. I'm not affiliated with the project, but I am an interested e-ink monitor enthusiast. You may be interested to know that this project is a fully open project, all source code, verilog, algorithm documentation and hardware design files are on github: https://github.com/Modos-Labs/Glider https://github.com/Modos-Labs/Glider https://gitlab.com/zephray/caster https://gitlab.com/zephray/caster

Forgeties79 1y ago
I talked to my wife constantly about how badly I want an e-ink monitor, they’re just still so expensive for the specs I want haha. I’d take a solid 24”, maybe 21”, b&w 30hz at this point if the price was right (sub-$500).
- alex-a-soto 1y ago
  Yeah, to get a 24" e-ink monitor anywhere near that price, we’d need much higher production volumes. Right now, it just isn’t mass-produced enough to bring costs down to the sub-$500 range.
  - Forgeties79 1y ago
    I totally understand the limitations there, i’m just spelling out what I’d like!
  - 4gotunameagain 1y ago
    Since you are really into that stuff, could you please share your opinion about the widely shared view that e-ink remains artificially expensive due to patents ? Or point to reading material you find truthful. Thanks !
alex-a-soto 1y ago
Three years ago, I posted about modding a ThinkPad T480 into an e-ink laptop: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26245563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26245563 That turned into a community project and eventually into building our own FPGA-based e-ink display controller to improve refresh speed and reduce ghosting. The result is a dev kit and monitor: open hardware, supports 6–13" monochrome and color e-ink panels over HDMI or USB-C, up to 75 Hz with sub-100 ms latency, and includes a C API. Hardware, firmware, docs and schematics: https://github.com/Modos-Labs/Glider https://github.com/Modos-Labs/Glider

RossBencina 1y ago

The devboard shipped with this kit has USB Type-C DisplayPort and DVI via microHDMI, both provided by off-the-shelf interface ICs. I would love to see a version that can take LVDS from a typical laptop motherboard to allow for modding a laptop (maybe a Framework 13)? The design appears to use a low-end FPGA with fairly modest resource usage, so I suspect it is technically feasible to interface video LVDS direct to the FPGA. I'm not sure about the power requirements however.

wtallis 1y ago
The Type-C DP input appears to be using a DP to LVDS converter, so the FPGA is already accepting LVDS, it just doesn't expose a connector for it. But for interfacing with laptops, these days it's eDP that matters, not LVDS. So the issue is mostly the mismatch between an internal eDP connector vs the board's type-C connector.

lemonberry 1y ago

There was a really neat post here from November of last year about a person making an e-ink display for his mother with amnesia. It may be of interest if you like this stuff. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42135520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42135520

perching_aix 1y ago

Really impressed by how fast epaper is these days, but the demo video really doesn't look refresh rate compliant at 60 Hz.

alex-a-soto 1y ago
We have some other videos, with more to come this week. Generative Forest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fLYVwh4XCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fLYVwh4XCE Return of the Obra Dinn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClK8lDJWJcw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClK8lDJWJcw

qwertytyyuu 1y ago

75hz woah

arkensaw 1y ago

I'm disappointed by how expensive these things still are. Smartphone size eink panels are so cheap that every supermarket has thousands of them as price display panels. but try and find epaper bigger than 10" and you'll be paying $350+ just for a panel that does nothing by itself.

system2 1y ago

Can't do anything with eink in the USA because of the patents. This is very frustrating.

oojuliuso 1y ago

Why Amazon can't use its economies of scale to build a Kindle monitor that devs and writers would early adopt like wildfire is a strange curiosity.

wkat4242 1y ago

Um that "driver board" has more power than a raspberry pi lol. No wonder it's so expensive