Reasonably priced color e-ink display

https://www.waveshare.com/5.65inch-e-paper-module-f.htm

by zdw • 6 years ago

413 208 6 years ago

pmdulaney2• 6 years ago

How difficult would it be for a maker type to cobble together a portable vim editor using one of these?

The 7-colour version doesn't support partial refresh and has a 15s refresh time (~0.067Hz refresh rate), so you'd want to be a really confident touch typist.

pmdulaney2• 6 years ago

Thanks...

Wowfunhappy• 6 years ago

Mind, the black and white e-ink screens would still work for this.

ranger207• 6 years ago

Sounds like it's time to learn ed.

hedora2• 6 years ago

The Freescale i.MX508 controller can do 8fps. It seems completely capable of displaying vim, but is monochrome. Here’s a video:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0DVlGZ3_d3Q

I’d love one of these with a full keyboard, wifi and enough of a terminal emulator to ssh somewhere.

ianai2• 6 years ago

From a decade ago. Seems odd how this tech has so few applications.

nightowl_games• 6 years ago

I was chasing down this route a while ago with a Waveshare touch screen and a RPI3. I was wiring stuff up on a breadboard and was so stoked when things worked. The next level is that you send a schematic into a custom circuit board company and they send you back a PCB. The future is that we custom print open source PCB designs, solder our RPIs and Touch Screens on and bam we have custom brewed machines.

bradly• 6 years ago

Not e-ink, but you can get a RasperryPi case with a built-in display along with battery pack. Pairing with a 40% keyboard gives a nice, portable environment.

sparker7267814• 6 years ago

Great video on these sorts of displays, what they're capable of, and perhaps some inspiration for any hobby projects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsbiO8EAsGw&t=617s

efskap• 6 years ago

As an alternative approach, I mounted my 2012 Kindle PW, a raspberry pi, and my split keyboard (diverge 2) on a folding guitar stand.

And I mean, it works: https://i.imgur.com/FNbKA0b.jpg

Vim certainly makes the latency tolerable.

staycoolboy• 6 years ago

I did NOT expect this to be under US$100. Definitely going for low power with SPI interface, but I don't get their refresh claim. SPI tops out around 1MB/s... 600x448x7 is ~235KB or 4 fps at 1MBps... but 15fps? That'd be 7MB/s, which is nigh impossible on SPI.

EDIT: 15 SECONDS PER FRAME, not 15fps. Thanks everyone for pointing that out. Still, amazingly cheap ... and almost no standby current after programming.

marcinzm2• 6 years ago

I read the spec (column "FULL REFRESH TIME (S)") as saying 15 seconds per refresh not 15 refreshes per second. So 4 frames per minute which falls well within your calculation.

edit: Fixed to be 4 frames per minute not 4 frames per second.

blacksmith_tb• 6 years ago

Wouldn't that be 4fpm (frames per minute)? Which is no problem for signage, but not really practical as a secondary display...

tqi• 6 years ago

I think its actually 15 seconds per frame, not frames per second

fulafel2• 6 years ago

It's seven color, not 7-bit. Also there might be just a "set color" command followed by 1-bit pixel data instead of a 4-bit pixel representation, or something.

Coffeewine• 6 years ago

I have a three color model from waveshare, and the way it works for it is you have to send a black and white bitmap, followed by a color and white bitmap. It's possible for these guys you need to repeat that five times.

LeifCarrotson2• 6 years ago

FULL REFRESH TIME 15s

That's 15 seconds per frame, or 0.067 fps.

That refresh rate is fine if you're using it to show the price of a rack of clothing, or various sensors - but you're not going to get smooth-scrolling text with it. The low-power interface is for those same battery-backed retail signage applications, where you're driving this, the microcontroller, and the wireless receiver with 3.7v from a coin cell.

Glad to see these becoming available for consumers and hackers! They've been hard to come by for years.

JKCalhoun2• 6 years ago

Or a "magic mirror" showing weather, calendar, time: you know, hours and minutes only :).

ds• 6 years ago

Havent looked into this much- What is the maximum 'refresh' rate you can get out of something like this?

criddell2• 6 years ago

The page says 15s.

OkGoDoIt• 6 years ago

That is what the page says, but can that possibly be right? I know e-ink tends to have very low refresh rates but taking a full 15 seconds to redraw seems excessive. I have found sites like this often have pretty obvious errors on them, is it likely this is correct or a typo?

sparker7267814• 6 years ago

For single or double-color displays, you can do pretty decently. This Applied Sciences video on YT goes over what's possible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsbiO8EAsGw

non-entity• 6 years ago

Perhaps someone more familiar with the technology can help me understand. Why are e-ink displays either tiny (tablet-sized or smaller) or huge (for digital signage)? I always thought it would be cool to have an x-teen or 20 something inch e-ink monitor to make reading docs, specs, etc. much easier. I realize the refresh rate on these things is pretty low, but I've read accounts of some screens being clocked to around 20hz which may not be enough to watch videos or play games, but it would be ok for reading and scrolling.

OTOH I did see a 30 something inch e-ink development board for sale once and wondered if I could hack one together. It was expensive, but that didn't particularly matter because the company made it clear they wouldn't sell to consumers or hobbyists.

caleb-allen2• 6 years ago

I found this 10.3 inch monitor on their site, it's quite expensive though https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/eink-disp...

ianai2• 6 years ago

I wonder how well that works in practice. At 15hz refresh I think it’d be fine for vi.

mavhc• 6 years ago

https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/12.48inch... screen without the hdmi interface is much cheaper

lowdose• 6 years ago

because the company made it clear they wouldn't sell to consumers or hobbyists.

But if you have a business address it always allowed to request a sample.

csours• 6 years ago

I've been wondering that for a while myself ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13771203

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22827833

sparker7267814• 6 years ago

There're a few things going on that contribute to this.

1) The rumors are that some of the display manufacturers have contracts with big device makers to not sell panels direct to consumer. I don't have evidence to verify this, though.

2) There aren't a lot of displays that exist _at all_ outside of the small/eReader/Big Sign categories. So there probably just aren't the production lines out there to push those out.

3) Since refresh rates in even the best cases aren't great, it's unlikely to get a lot of traction in most markets, so I don't think anyone is pursuing it heavily.

4) eInk (the company) seems very uninterested in the hobby market at all. They seem to want a few big contracts, and that's all they're interested in.

j88439h84• 6 years ago

What do you mean by 2? Monitors and TV screens fit that range, no?

vikramkr3• 6 years ago

For point 4, that could be a pretty smart move on their part and the reason they're able to keep going. Selling directly to consumers/setting up the distribution and marketing for that etc would be really difficult and a lot of D2C hardware companies have not done too well recently. It's unfortunate that it results in it being difficult to access for hobby markets, but relying on large, stable contracts from a lot of big manufacturers that already built up marketing and distribution over decades of operations is probably one of the better ways to commercialize a hardware innovation today.

amelius3• 6 years ago

The rumors are that some of the display manufacturers have contracts with big device makers to not sell panels direct to consumer.

Would that be legal?

falcolas5• 6 years ago

IMO, Point 3 is not really a problem, at least in the e-reader usecase. Even typing isn't too bad when partial refresh is enabled. Something like VIM on a black&white panel with kindle-grade refresh options seems quite reasonable.

Now then, with the linked screen's 15 second refresh time, this is obviously not the case. But it (naively) seems like a compromise to keep the cost low, since the added tech and software to enable partial refreshes would add to both price and complexity.

thebeefytaco• 6 years ago

I've been wanting to get some dev kits to play around with, but they're pretty expensive and not custom enough for my intended use case.

cosmie• 6 years ago

It was expensive, but that didn't particularly matter because the company made it clear they wouldn't sell to consumers or hobbyists.

I created an LLC a few years ago to route my moonlighting consulting work through.

Even if my need for it dries up eventually, I'd still probably keep it around. Single greatest benefit of having it is ease of access to the commercial and industrial supply chain and slipping through these sorts of "no consumer or hobbyists allowed" sales positions.

Groxx2• 6 years ago

Dasung has been selling a 13-inch-ish for a while: https://www.amazon.com/Dasung-Paperlike-Front-Light-Touch-Mo...

But that's still within the "arguably a tablet screen" size range.

tanjtanjtanj• 6 years ago

The Onyx Boox line has a 13.3" display version. They mainly cater to musicians using them for sheet music but I have a friend that consumes textbook PDFs at a pace of about 3 per week that swears by his.

owenshen24• 6 years ago

I also have one of these and I really like the 13" screen. Recommended, though pricey.

kps• 6 years ago

For those who care, there have been recent reports that Onyx are actively and deliberately violating GPL.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/comments/hsn7kx/onyx_usin...

Jolter• 6 years ago

Sony makes one, too, but it seems to hobbled by not running a real OS to make it useful. All it does is read PDF files.

ptman• 6 years ago

The remarkable isn't quite that big, but nice for PDFs (and annotating them as well) https://remarkable.com/

orcasauce• 6 years ago

I've very much wanted to tile them across a wall of my house to make a virtual/dynamic "smart wall" for quite a while. Even a B/W version would be sufficient. Last time I checked in was late 2018 and at that time there wasn't a good sub-six-figure solution. It'd also require a lot of manual work on each cell since the cells didn't have a zero width bezel for gapless tiling.

fulafel2• 6 years ago

Anyone know how tolerant these are of UV, how long will it survive in frequent direct sunlight?

sparker7267814• 6 years ago

I don't know about UV itself, but the spec sheet on my 7" Waveshare eInk display says to avoid direct sunlight and extreme heat.

caleb-allen2• 6 years ago

If you are having issues with the site loading you can try this archive link https://web.archive.org/web/20200717131125/https://www.waves...

vikramkr3• 6 years ago

Thanks for the link. Looks like they've been hugged to death at the moment.

chrismorgan• 6 years ago

There are serious trade-offs in these things:

• In monochrome panels, you can get 16 shades, and a full refresh in under a second (with partial refresh much faster, as tight as very few milliseconds for small areas, or commonly 30fps full-screen update if you’re willing to compromise a bit on image quality).

• In colour panels, you don’t seem to get shades or rapid refresh: seven colours means you get a seven colour palette, so you’ll have to use dithering to get any in-between colours; and you don’t get partial updates at all: even the fastest coloured panels take a couple of seconds to update the image, and the more colours you add the slower it is.

If I’m wrong about these and there are colour panels with more interesting colour or partial refresh, I’m interested to hear. I just haven’t seen any, and have done some looking.

The long and the short of it is that colour e-ink displays are only useful for display use, not for individual devices like ebook readers or computer displays.

vikeri• 6 years ago

Was just about to ask the refresh time, I specifically chose this one due to it's faster refresh time (1 s) compared to color displays: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/inky-what?variant=2121402...

RL_Quine• 6 years ago

You pretty much do two full refreshes, and then some. The first one drives the pigment (red,yellow) layers, and then the black ones.

sparker7267814• 6 years ago

And the dithering isn't even that great, as not all color combinations are easily-mixed, given their varied densities.

zestyping• 6 years ago

Why does the refresh time depend on the size of the region updated? Forgive my ignorance—I'm imagining that the limiting factor would be the time it takes for the grains to physically flip over, because they all flip concurrently.

nitrogen5• 6 years ago

Hypothesizing a bit here: maybe it's like flash, where erasing is slow and has to be done in large chunks, but once a large chunk is erased small chunks can be written (once) quickly.

pocak• 6 years ago

Only one row at a time has voltage applied to it. In one update, the image is scanned out multiple times, so it appears as if all pixels were changing simultaneously (and perhaps they do, if the electrodes have significant capacitance.)

With fewer rows to update, each row gets a push more often, flipping the grains faster.

bufferoverflow• 6 years ago

600x448px resolution makes it very limied for most applications. And it's too expensive to be used as a tag in a store.

pfrench42• 6 years ago

Is it just me or should this be four color CMYK like a regular printer?

Ajedi32• 6 years ago

Interesting question.

My understanding is that modern printers actually mix those four different inks together on the page to achieve a wide range of colors. That isn't possible with a display where colors have to remain within their own separate (sub)pixels and can't actually mix together.

With a high enough resolution that might not matter, as your eyes would be unable to discern individual subpixels, but this display is only 600×448, and that's with only one subpixel per pixel. (A CMYK display would need 4; maybe slightly less depending on subpixel layout.)

Furthermore, modern sRGB displays can output 255 different brightness values for each subpixel. This display can only output 7 values for each pixel. That further reduces the number of possible colors which would be possible in a CMYK subpixel-based display.

Provided all those issues could be solved though; maybe it would work? There could be other considerations I'm missing. (E.g. Can subtractive color mixing even work with subpixels in the first place?)

thegagne• 6 years ago

Hm, I think the challenge is the pixel density is rather low, and unlike ink you don’t get any ink mixing.

Good printers are 600dpi, and 300dpi is passable, but this thing is 600x448 pixels on 5.65inch screen.

I think when pixel count is low, using rgb is more efficient.

I’m not an expert in any of this so this is just guesswork.

sparker7267814• 6 years ago

Turns out that e-ink displays typically don't mix colors this way. In order to get multiple colors in a single display, they use sort of colored-balls of various densities suspended in a fluid. Then, using the known viscosities of the fluid in the capsules, they can vary the charge of the electrodes very quickly to sort of _drag_ a color up to the top.

But when you do this, you're dragging a _single_ color.

_All_ the colors are in the capsule, but you can only truly pull a single one at a time, a true pigment-like mixing isn't possible. If you pull the Cyan up, you're necessarily losing the Magenta, for example.

If you had a high enough resolution addressable grid, you might be able to put the pixels close enough that you couldn't tell, but you'd still be basically doing sub-pixel color at that point, not truly mixing the various colors at the base level.

Maybe there are other e-ink displays doing something else, but all the ones I've seen are doing some form of this approach.

Here's a fascinating video on how these displays work, and how you can modify the firmware of the driver to get faster refresh rates (with an increased risk of burn-in). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsbiO8EAsGw

vikramkr3• 6 years ago

An area of research I've heard a bit about for next gen e-paper displays is to use electrowetting[1] which is a different approach that looks intersting

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrowetting#Applications

orlandohill2• 6 years ago

I've been using a 13.3" Dasung Paperlike HD-FT monitor for a few months. I use it without the front light, and set the display to 2x magnification. I'd highly recommend it to anyone having problems with LCD screens. http://dasungtech.com/

zcrar70• 6 years ago

How have you been finding it? Do you use it as your main monitor? (Or only at specific times / alongside a traditional monitor?)

Waterfall7• 6 years ago

For that price might as well get a ThinkBook Plus. https://thenextweb.com/plugged/2020/01/07/lenovo-put-an-e-in...

orlandohill2• 6 years ago

It works perfectly for reading documentation, writing code, and browsing the web. The refresh rate is fast enough to watch movies, but I haven't done that yet. Switching windows leaves faint artifacts on the screen, but I barely notice them, and there's a refresh button if I want to look at a detailed still image. I use it as my only monitor, and keep my laptop screen turned off. About once per week I'll toggle to my laptop's color monitor to view the art of a Kickstarter campaign, etc.

I don't miss color syntax highlighting, and it's much more relaxing on the eyes. I could imagine others using it as their main monitor in a joint display setup, code in e-ink, browser in color.

nicoburns• 6 years ago

I'm still sad that the Mirasol displays (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interferometric_modulator_disp...) never made it into mainstream products. They seemed to be the best of both worlds: high refresh rates, colour, and no power consumption when not refreshing.

elcritch• 6 years ago

Me too, the demos looked fantastic! Maybe after the patents expire other companies will pick up the tech.

AshamedCaptain• 6 years ago

I had one of the qualcomm toqs (which used a small mirasol display).

It didn't look that much better (or distinguishable, for the matter) than one of those reflective LCDs (e.g. Pebble's). And reflective "memory" LCDs also have almost negligible -- though not zero -- power consumption. Except for maybe signage products most people don't care about this difference, and LCD is way cheaper and mainstream, so...

It's no surprise that many manufacturers just put an LCD and try to get away by calling it "ePaper". There is a lot of geek appeal here, but I'm not really sure if we really need any new technology for "mainstream".

matmann20012• 6 years ago

Also had a Toq. Probably one of my favorite smartwatches, and would have loved to see it live long enough to run Android Wear. Unfortunately, Qualcomm isn't a product company and the Toq was essentially a proof of concept for both Mirasol and their new (at the time) line of smartwatch-focused Snapdragon chips. They managed to convince most of the major real smartwatch OEMs to use Snapdragon but the Mirasol just never got off the ground. Apparently manufacturing was very difficult, as you might imagine, and they were hitting limitations on pushing the color depth.

Groxx2• 6 years ago

Sounds like low saturation tho? I wonder if they lost out to transflective LCD (at least in mind-share, since those haven't been shipped much either, though there are a handful of products using them), as keeping an LCD "set" is cheap enough to often not be an issue.

That is a really neat technique though, I hadn't read up on the details before.

numpad0• 6 years ago

I had a Mirasol tablet. It sucks. Contrast is super low and I think image flickered until it would “settle”. Refresh rate wasn’t great either.

derefr• 6 years ago

So, why exactly is it that color e-ink displays try to make every micro-capsule capable of switching to any of the supported colors; rather than laying (groups of) CMYK micro-capsules out in a subpixel-like arrangement, and then wiring them to the substrate such that each of the CMYK "bitplanes" forms an independently-addressed display signal?

Sure, it'd look like badly-registered offset printing, but that only matters for small up-close displays, not large far-away displays. (And you could fix the registration with a precisely-cast diffuser layer, convolving each subpixel-cluster.)

If this was for reading rather than imagery, and you wanted to have true blacks, you could also just step one level forward in e-ink technology, and have the colored micro-capsule groups be just dual-tone (the capsule's color plus black), giving you {C+K, Y+K, M+K, K} bitplanes.

Are e-ink display manufacturers just imprecise in the way they deposit the capsules into the panel, making it impossible to address individual capsules? (If so, that seems like something that could be solved pretty easily with modern photolithography processes, e.g. etching onto the backing electrode a grid of "buckets" for individual micro-capsules to fall into.)

sparker7267814• 6 years ago

Yes, modern e-ink capsules are not precise. In fact, they're not intended to be.

If you look at an e-ink display under a microscope you'll see that the "pixels" are more like "shards" of variously-shaped cells.

https://twitter.com/sqfmi/status/1178018736684580865

The "pixels" are made of the actual addressing grid that creates the currents that attract the pigment in the capsules.

This is part of what ends up giving the appearance of a higher-resolution display when rendering text, as you get some softer edges "for free." (And it's what makes the display look 'blurry' for some viewers.)

So, to your question, there's currently no attempt with the technology to precisely place the colors on the display. The capsules are just spread all over, and the grid does the work.

naravara• 6 years ago

This makes me sad. Based on what you're describing it's sounding like my dream of having eReaders that are anywhere near sharp enough to do visually rich, full color, documents justice (e.g. nature photography, comic books and graphic novels, well illuminated manuscripts) will never come to fruition. Barring some kind of transformative breakthrough, of course.

Waterfall7• 6 years ago

The contrast ratio will never make it good for text. I have used the so called high res ones and I would take a 720p LCD any day. They are trash.

bearbin• 6 years ago

As a reflective display, you want to optimise for the percentage of useful light reflected back to the user. Switching the white (or black) out for another colour will necessarily reduce the contrast ratio of the display, which is of course not ideal when you don't have much light to work with in the first place (as it's a reflective display after all). That's why reflective LCD displays were pretty much a disaster, since the LCDs require a polarisng filter which absorbs a large portion of the light, and reflective colour LCDs more so, because that multiplies with the effect of the colour filters.

Of course, you could simply make a matrix of tri-tone capsules, with white, black and colour. Then you have the contrast ratio and the colour space advantages. I don't know why this hasn't been done, I'm not an expert on e-Ink!

amelius3• 6 years ago

Although nobody implemented this yet, I'm guessing someone did patent it already ...

NoodleIncident• 6 years ago

Colored e-ink displays are discussed at around 8:00 in this video; there are probably better sources, but this is the one I'm familiar with, so I figured I'd link it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsbiO8EAsGw

The microcapsules are not individually wired up to anything, so I don't think it's feasible to make each color channel independently addressable. Instead, a grid of wires behind the capsules are either positively or negatively charged, in order to attract or repel the charged colored particles in each capsule. There are only 2 charges, but by using different sizes of particles for different colors, you can finagle it so that the color you want ends up on top.

If they could address capsules individually, that would also increase the possible resolution of a black-and-white display; they'd do it if they could. But since the mechanism is about attracting and repelling charged particles, there's probably a pretty hard limit on how much you can increase the resolution before there is interference between neighboring pixels.

amelius3• 6 years ago

And you could fix the registration with a precisely-cast diffuser layer, convolving each subpixel-cluster.

Would that still look like paper, though?

swagonomixxx2• 6 years ago

I am desperately waiting for semi-high refresh rate (20Hz-30Hz) e-ink displays so that I can replace my traditional HD display with them.

They're significantly easier on the eyes and they're a joy to use. I don't particularly care about color. One thing I'm wondering though, is what are the technical challenges behind building such a display?

Ideally, I'd like to be able to use an Android device that renders onto e-ink. I don't particularly care for watching videos and such - most of my time on my phone is spent sending and reading IM's (Signal, text, e-mail) rather than viewing media, so lower refresh rates is not something I really care about.

Where are the shortcomings causing e-ink displays to have very low refresh rate? Does it have to do with modern rendering technology being so well optimized for color displays that they simply are not performant for e-ink?

tetraca• 6 years ago

As far as I understand the technology, it's slow because you are physically pushing/pulling pigments around in little cells. It's simply not as fast a process as passing voltage across a crystal or shooting an electron beam.

sparker7267814• 6 years ago

Here's how these work:

1) Take a fluid, color it mostly white(ish).

2) Suspend a bunch of tiny black "balls" inside this fluid. The balls need to be charged so they can be attracted to an electric field.

3) Squish this fluid between some glass.

4) Put a grid of electrodes on the back that you can address.

5) Now, using some clever AC patterns, you can address any "pixel" on your grid, and apply a charge there, that will attract or repel the little balls.

6) When you attract the balls, that spot turns black, because you just see the balls above the fluid.

7) When you repel the balls, that spot turns "white" because you just see the fluid, not the balls.

The trick is that moving the balls back and forth (6/7) is a physical process, and requires time. They _have_ to move a physical distance, and if that fluid lets them move too easily then they won't keep their color. The balls will move and they'll just drift back to some middle ground.

Also, if you're not careful with your approach, you can mess with the charge of the balls, and they'll no longer respond to the field the way you want. This is burn-in. (And it's why displays do full-black-to-full-white refreshes from time to time)

So until we can figure out how to move those balls faster in the fluid, we really aren't going to dramatically improve refresh rates with this technology.

Note: "Balls" is a simplification.

thatguy0900• 6 years ago

Thanks for this explanation, really interesting

iAmAPencilYo• 6 years ago

Thank you for the simple explanation of this tech!

andeee23• 6 years ago

I wonder if it will be possible in the future to apply a similar concept for for a 3d e ink desplay where the grid pulls cells through a 3d medium.

deng• 6 years ago

Take a look at the Onyx Boox Max series:

https://onyxboox.com/boox_max3

They're 13.3" displays, work with Android and you can use them as an external HDMI display. However, the refresh rate is still poor, not nearly 20-30Hz. The Technology Connections Youtube channel has made two very interesting videos, showing the many caveats of the device (it's an older model, but I'd guess most of it still applies). The main issues are poor software and slow CPU:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NfX0vlCa4k

abawany• 6 years ago

I recommend going to https://mobileread.com/forums to read about user experiences with Onyx and other makers. They are interesting devices but the support level is not at the same level as a Kobo/Nook/Kindle. I used to have a Boyue Likebook Mimas, which was a great ereader hobbled by a slow processor and itchy software.

Shorel• 6 years ago

Ideally, I'd like to be able to use an Android device that renders onto e-ink.

You can buy one now. The money will (probably) be used to improve this technology.

dubcanada2• 6 years ago

What I really would like is a touchscreen version of this. I think the idea of a "panel" is amazing, but I'd like either a touch overlap or touch screen built in.

Anyone know of any e-ink with touch built in? can be black and white.

swagonomixxx2• 6 years ago

The Amazon Kindle has a touch e-ink screen. You can use it to read books (mobi format) or browse the web (albeit in a very limited fashion - but I use it to browse HN and works fine).

dubcanada2• 6 years ago

I guess I should have been more specific, I meant one I could modify/make a custom app for/what ever.

thekyle• 6 years ago

I use my Kindle as a dedicated Reddit and HN machine before bed and it is pretty great.

Waterfall7• 6 years ago

https://thenextweb.com/plugged/2020/01/07/lenovo-put-an-e-in...

hansjorg• 6 years ago

The reMarkable (https://remarkable.com/og) has a touch screen and runs Linux. Supposedly it's possible to run generic desktop Linux distributions on it as well.

GekkePrutser• 6 years ago

Waveshare is really great for making eInk accessible to makers. I've got several of their products and I love them. Design and documentation are excellent. For most products they even provide libraries and/or sample code. I usually order from them directly, though it comes from China it's fairly fast compared to aliexpress and the like (think more like 2 weeks than 2 months)

By the way, one thing I don't get is why the pictures have such low saturation but the "demo" view shows really excellent saturation. Are there constraints when mixing colours perhaps?

Edit: This was explained below by sparker72678: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23900165 . I didn't know they worked this way.

1MachineElf• 6 years ago

15s refresh time. Not bad I guess for certain applications.

ravenstine• 6 years ago

Wait a sec, they have multi-color e-ink now and not just red or green? I cannot wait until we can get large versions of these that can hang on my walls! I'd love to put them in frames and have different paintings rotate in and out.

tracker1• 6 years ago

I've been considering building a 2-way mirror display with a regular lcd myself. Would prefer a larger e-ink, but they just seem too expensive for what they are.

ilaksh• 6 years ago

I hope that one day truly large scale e-ink systems become somewhat affordable. I think it could be revolutionary for architecture.

The appearance of buildings would no longer necessarily be static.

More generally, I believe that the extreme minimalism, "tranquility" (or blandness) and simplicity of more contemporary styles may some day become unpopular.

So I expect that we will see trends in the opposite direction eventually. More colors. Maybe a changing facade with e-ink. Rather than simple, boxy shapes, more intricate and more organic shapes. Large-scale 3d printing could make the use of such forms more practical.

I also expect to see architecture that is more dynamic in that it will automatically reconfigure itself in response to weather changes or the day/night cycle, winter/summer, etc.

abetusk• 6 years ago

Not directly related but there's an awesome "Open Book" project which is an open source hardware e-book reader [1].

[1] https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book

matmann20012• 6 years ago

I wonder what the refresh time on this looks like. I recently finished a project with a red/black/white e-ink display, and the docs for it listed a worst-case refresh time of up to 14 seconds.

sparker7267814• 6 years ago

The docs say 15 seconds per refresh.

renewiltord4• 6 years ago

Who knows how to reasonably get power to stuff like these on walls with unobtrusive cables? Anyone have any arrangements at home that make these look nice or if not, unnoticeable?

nanomonkey• 6 years ago

There is flat cable that you can mud and paint over, usually only good for cables that don't need shielding such as power cables. Data can be sent wireless using an esp32 on the receiving end if you don't already have that capability. There are also cable covers that look like molding.

renewiltord4• 6 years ago

Thank you!

pi-rat• 6 years ago

- Pull power inside the wall. Drill a hole on top, another one on the bottom, use one of those magnetic cable pullers. Wires for 5v requires two tiny holes in drywall that's easy to patch later. There's also pretty kits made for TVs, but those require bigger holes (for HDMI, power, etc).

- Pull power from the room behind the wall. Maybe it's more out of view here.

- Place it next to a door, remove part of the frame, run wires inside the door frame.

- Cable channel exists in many different shapes and sizes, not only the boring box ones.

- Go the opposite route, why hide your cable? Make it stand out. Like those wall lamps with a brightly coloured / patterned cable hanging in loops down the wall. Turn it into wall art.

You can find some pretty wall mounted tablets in the homeautomation and homeassistant reddits :)

renewiltord4• 6 years ago

Thank you!

rglover• 6 years ago

Does anybody know of a decent micro controller that could be paired with one of these on the form factor/scale of a Kindle?

Animats• 6 years ago

It's still 3x as expensive as an LCD display of the same size. The LCD display has full color, too.[1] The E-Ink display offers only 7 faded colors.

[1] https://www.buydisplay.com/5-inch-lcd-screen-tft-module-800x...

filleduchaos• 6 years ago

They're not competitors.

kevin_thibedeau• 6 years ago

Sunlight readable though.

Waterfall7• 6 years ago

Never used a b+w monochrome display before? I remember the non color iPods were great in the sun.

grzeczko2• 6 years ago

Are there any e-ink displays that are touchscreen? I did a whole lot of searching and couldn't find any.

sparker7267814• 6 years ago

Clearly it's possible to manufacture such a thing, but I haven't seen any available for sale (as a stand alone item) that have a touch layer.

martin-adams• 6 years ago

Like the Kindle? I’d imagine the tech exists somewhere.

grzeczko2• 6 years ago

Not the Kindle. Looking for a touchscreen e-ink display I can use with my Raspberry Pi

drdebug• 6 years ago

Both the Onyx Boox Max Pro 2 and 3 have a 13.3" e-ink touch screen and run Android. On my Boox Max Pro 2 when in monitor mode (HDMI input) however the touch information is not forwarded to the host PC when connected with USB. I guess in theory an android app could do that though.

efreak2• 6 years ago

Suitable For Price Tags, Asset/Equipment Tags, Shelf Labels, Conference Name Tags...

Maybe it's just me, but this seems quite expensive for a price tag. It also seems quite large for a name tag. I get that eink is useful in general for these cases, but this doesn't seem to be the best example.

folken• 6 years ago

The display has an SPI interface with a 15s per page refresh rate and is only useable for sinage.

There is however the Hisense A5C phone with Color E-ink Display now on the market and it features a decent refresh rate.

https://forum.xcsoar.org/download/file.php?id=1113

Valord• 6 years ago

If interested check out https://goodereader.com/blog/ for more info on what's coming out for e-ink.

Not affiliated, just a fan.

joshu• 6 years ago

i would like a laptop with four of these. I arrange my xterms that way anyway.

dmitrygr• 6 years ago

Attempted to look at the datasheet. There is no link, there is an image that says "user manual" and "dev resources" but it is not clickable. There is a note that says "Resources for different product may vary, please check the wiki page to confirm the actually provided resources."

ok, i clicked the wiki link: www.waveshare.com/wiki/5.65inch_e-Paper_Module_(F)

"There is currently no text in this page. You can search for this page title in other pages, or search the related logs, but you do not have permission to create this page."

so, not really hobbyist friendly

Abishek_Muthian• 6 years ago

Waveshare e-ink displays are good for small DIY projects, but not more than that due to questionable reliability over long term use, but I'm glad they exist and they have good documentation.

Also, since the refresh rates are limited it's not like we can build ourselves a nice external large e-ink display for our reading pleasure and for the sake of our eyes.

There's a need gap for 'Affordable E-Ink large external displays'[1], last time we discussed about it here it was pointed out that the likely reason for we not having such displays are due to IP.

[1]https://needgap.com/problems/43-affordable-e-ink-large-exter... [Disclosure: It is my problem validation platform].

cranium• 6 years ago

Don't think about making anything remotely real time as the full display refresh takes around 15s and there is no partial refresh available.

beshrkayali• 6 years ago

Are there any alternative e-ink displays with lower screen refresh time? 15 seconds is a bit much. Or at least one that'd allow partial refresh? Not necessarily with color.

phaedrus• 6 years ago

I just ordered it.

Reasonably priced color e-ink display

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