A 12.48 Inch (1304x984) Three-Color E-Paper Display by Waveshare

https://louwrentius.com/a-1248-inch-1304x984-three-color-e-paper-display-by-waveshare.html

by louwrentius • 6 years ago

55 30 6 years ago

morsch2• 6 years ago

$179 for a 12 inch three color display is approaching reasonable. Are eink prices finally going down?

wojciii• 6 years ago

The refresh rate of 16 seconds for the whole display is not reasonable in my opinion. Unless you just use it to display static images that don't change while you're looking at it. With partial refresh it would be ok, I think.

mobilio• 6 years ago

Exactly!

Also count their low-power consumption and you can easy convinced even fans of LCD displays.

fmajid• 6 years ago

Yes. If he is updating the display every minute, that's 25% of the time spent in refresh, where presumably the display is unreadable.

cookiengineer• 6 years ago

I don't understand why the refresh latency is so absurdly high...can somebody ELI5 why there's not even 1 frame/second possible with eink displays?

icedistilled• 6 years ago

It seems it's actually a refresh of 8 seconds for the black layer and another 8 seconds for the red layer done separately.

Kindles refresh the black layer much faster. I don't see why it's soo much slower.

But since it's literally particles moving inside the display, it will never super fast but 8 seconds is very limiting.

baybal2• 6 years ago

You always pay a huge premium for the bigger screen you want with Eink.

webmobdev• 6 years ago

It's neither reasonable nor going down. I remember reading that full colour displays are not much costlier to manufacture than the greyscale ones, yet they still have a large price gap.

m463• 6 years ago

I believe this is a niche market. It would be nice to have the volume necessary to drive the price down (ane get the volume up)

That said, having a display that refreshes in seconds vs single-digit milliseconds works to keep it niche.

morsch2• 6 years ago

I think it's much cheaper than eink's offerings. E.g. they want $149 for a 5.6 inch three color display https://shopkits.eink.com/product/5-65-spectra-3000-yellow-e...

abdullahkhalids• 6 years ago

There is lots of interesting code here https://github.com/joukos/PaperTTY

scintill76• 6 years ago

Thanks for the report. I am surprised it takes 30+ seconds just to prepare the images, but I haven’t looked deeply to estimate what I would actually expect. It looks like you could parallelize the imagemagick commands though (unless it already is and I just don’t understand the Python.)

lostlogin• 6 years ago

I hope this gets into ESPhome - that project is amazing.

villgax• 6 years ago

Need something large & portable to read PDFs without eye-strain.

LeifCarrotson• 6 years ago

I'd recommend the Remarkable 2 tablet. Runs Linux, active hacker community, gorgeous epaper display.

Sony makes a nice one as well, but it's a lot more expensive and a lot more locked down.

These Waveshare displays are more suitable for Arduino projects.

solnyshok• 6 years ago

and Sony recently decided to stop development of new models.

sam_bristow• 6 years ago

Do you have one? From what I've seen people seem to think the hardware is solid but the software is rather lacking.

mrestko• 6 years ago

I recently bought a Boox Note 2 for this and it works very well. I had previously tried reading PDFs and technical documents on my Kindle but it was pointless since it was so small. The Note 2 is just a little smaller than regular letter size paper and it runs a full Android operating system so it's easy to get whatever document management system you want to use working on it (including the Kindle app).

stefan_• 6 years ago

Thats a lot of pixels for what is a tremendously slow SPI interface.

nousermane• 6 years ago

OP says "it takes 16 seconds to refresh the screen".

At 0.0625 FPS, SPI bandwidth [0] is plenty fast with some to spare.

[0] https://www.microchip.com/forums/m770156.aspx

social_quotient• 6 years ago

Unrelated: I always post when I see e-paper display and e-ink articles that I think baby monitors should be made from this type of screen. The lack of an emitting light all night while trying to sleep would be amazing. The battery life would be greatly improved and less likely to die when you have the monitor unplugged in other areas of the house.

mcphage2• 6 years ago

I don't think e-ink screens would be good for a baby monitor. The slow refresh rate would make them a poor choice for monitoring a video stream, and the repeated flashing when changing the image would make them annoying at night.

mmmqaq• 6 years ago

I suspect the baby monitor is not for monitoring the baby, it is the monitor for the baby to read and watch some fun images.

A 12.48 Inch (1304x984) Three-Color E-Paper Display by Waveshare

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