Challenges Building an Open-Source E Ink Laptop

https://alexsoto.dev/challenges-building-an-open-source-eink-laptop.html

by alex-a-soto • 5 years ago

261 104 5 years ago

Hey HN, I'm the project lead at EI2030, and we are working on building an open-source eink laptop.

From the day-to-day conversations with community members from EI2030, we've identified some challenges with building an eink laptop.

We've decided to write an article to introduce EI2030, discuss the challenges of building an open-source eink laptop, and hear from others.

If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, please feel free to reach out.

mntmn3• 5 years ago

Hi, I'm the project lead of MNT Reform, an open hardware laptop that just started shipping (link: https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/reform)!

We would be interested in an e-Ink experiment. During the initial prototyping this was one of the options we considered, but back then it would have been prohibitively expensive and we decided to focus on an IPS display and to get to ship a viable product as quickly as possible -- with a tiny team.

Adapting an e-Ink display to MNT Reform would mostly be about designing/adapting the screen housing and introducing a signal path to an e-Ink driver: options could be MIPI-DSI, eDP, USB, or SPI, for example.

Edit: My email is lukas@mntre.com if you want to get in touch directly. We also have a community over here: https://community.mnt.re/

baybal23• 5 years ago

Wow, such people here.

Hello Lukas,

I will say MNT reform was probably the best shot at "artisanal laptop" I've ever seen.

It's a good, good balance on ones ambitions, and reasonable expectations of what a small team can manufacture, while still feeling very unique, and original.

alex-a-soto5• 5 years ago

Hey Lukas, Thank you for your comment and for reaching out. I'm a big fan of MNT Reform, and it's great to hear of your interest in doing an e-ink experiment. We are interested. I'll send you an email later today to talk further.

drewzero1• 5 years ago

I just want to say that I love your work! I have been following on Mastodon and watching the MNT Reform project with considerable interest, and the possibility of an E-Ink option really helps sweeten the pot. At this point I'm pretty certain I want my next new laptop to be a Reform.

marcodiego2• 5 years ago

What I'd love: a common chassis that includes:

  - Some usb devices: keyboard, touchpad, camera and internal usb hub for additional devices and external ports.

  - HDMI screen with amplified speakers.

  - Battery charger and internal power source for internal devices.

  - Internal space for HD, SSD, eMMC, WiFi antenna adapter and most common ARM SBCs.

This would allow me to buy a cheap ARM SBC and "build" my own laptop. Except for the battery and internal hub, CrowPi2 is almost like that[0] but CrowPi2 is a toy. We need something that is a tad better than CrowPi2 and not a toy.

[0] https://www.elecrow.com/crowpi2-raspberry-pi-portable-laptop...

mntmn3• 5 years ago

I am thinking to adopt a SOM standard like Qseven or COMExpress etc. in the (a bit more far) future. What do you think about that? SBCs are not really a good fit for laptops in my opinion because you have to adapt everything with individual cables that are meant for external use. And: are there any SBCs you would like to use except for the Raspberry Pi?

axiolite• 5 years ago

I'd like that too, but I'd want enough space to fit one of those Atom mini-PCs into it.

Just imagine, you could keep using your laptop for decades upon decades! Your upgrade is just swapping out the mini-PC inside it.

baybal23• 5 years ago

I feel the project outline is very idealised, without any much regard to how manufacturing will be done.

Massive component shortages are a life, and death matter for small companies now, and it's not only about IC shortage.

What we had in the industry for last 5-6 year is a chronic shortages, and interruptions of supplies of passives for example.

Redesigning entire power supply circuit, and re-layouting the PCB because one can't find a high spec capacitor? Happened many times on my watch.

Doing design is only like 10% of time one spends to manufacture anything, and because of that it's not rational to obsess over it.

For an enthusiast team, just getting anything, even a prototype run coming out of a factory is where 9 out of 10 projects stall.

People run out of the financial runway thinking the factory gate being the finish point... and then they get an email like "Please redesign all your design, and do it 1 week or loose the manufacturing time slot"

rrmm• 5 years ago

Yeah,the technical challenge of getting something working usually end up being the easier part. Manufacturing ends up being very difficult: at a small scale, it's super expensive and at a medium to large scale, logistics becomes difficult.

At every scale changes to the design (either for enhancements or EOL parts) is expensive. Injection molding dies require significant engineering, setup, and futzing-with to bring to production. More recent innovations in mfr'ing can be helpful (speed up prototyping and lower the cost of spinning molds or dies) but can't completely liberate you from the difficulties.

I would love to see stuff like this succeed, but the difficulty can't be underestimated.

alex-a-soto5• 5 years ago

Thank you for your feedback. I agree with your points; manufacturing is an essential part of the process that I neglected to include in the article. Thank you for bringing it up. When we are at that stage, I would appreciate your feedback and suggestions.

ddevault4• 5 years ago

Hi Alex! Please, please, please do not use Discord to organize your open source project's community. Open source projects should rely on open source infrastructure. Discord is a proprietary platform, with a proprietary client, using a proprietary protocol, and has no business being involved in FOSS projects.

Please consider using IRC or Matrix.

alex-a-soto5• 5 years ago

Hi, we are working on setting up a Matrix server with bridges to other platforms. If you have suggestions or experience in this, I would appreciate your support.

zepto2• 5 years ago

Open source projects should rely on open source infrastructure.

Can you say why?

alex-a-soto5• 5 years ago

Hi ddevault, We've created a Zulip server and will be transitioning away from Discord.

Zulip Server: https://ei2030.zulipchat.com/register/

hasmanean• 5 years ago

Is the display fast enough to be used as a laptop?

I wonder if using an eink display as a detachable auxiliary display to show static data such as calendars, todo lists, chats and system monitoring would be more useful.

IshKebab• 5 years ago

Dasung makes e-ink monitors and it looks like they can get something like 20 fps, which is pretty good. Probably just enough to use a mouse without going mad. Maybe.

https://youtu.be/AeC3LIFTaho?t=208

dredmorbius• 5 years ago

Using a Mobius e-Ink device, a bigger issue is the ghosting. The discussion of RLCD with up to 60 fps refresh is interesting.

For console work, the ghosting is acceptable. For full-screen GUI, it would likely become distracting if windows are moved frequently or contain animated graphics. For reading text, the quality of e-Ink displays is excellent. And outdoor visibility is incorrectly discounted in the article.

As a standalone display, such as you describe, e-Ink should be quite well suited.

an_opabinia• 5 years ago

How do you know you are succeeding?

initramfs4• 5 years ago

i guess it depends on how you define succeeding:)

We reached 210+ Discord members today.

tyler1094• 5 years ago

Direct invite link to EI2030 community discord for anyone that doesn't want to search: https://discord.gg/nnxKnxh

jrrrr• 5 years ago

This is great!

For years when discussing displays and computing ergonomics, I've claimed that I look forward to the day when my screen doesn't need to emit light, and maybe using it can feel more like paper.

Reading this makes it seem less sci-fi future, and possible today if we can get enough interest/momentum.

I'm trying to think of practical places to start for a sellable product. I love the Paperterm idea, but recognize that it's super niche. Maybe something focused on distraction-free writing?

initramfs4• 5 years ago

Hi jrrr! I am co-developer of PaperTerm- I agree it is very niche right now. The Pomera DM30 is a distraction free typewriter- it is relatively new (there is also much older options like the AlphaSmart Neo2)- I hope to develop something similar to that with a laptop and some more office apps. I also research solar power managers, as the low power is definitely feasible with e-ink.

jfim• 5 years ago

Pomera DM30

Wow, thanks for the heads-up that they actually released this! I backed their Kickstarter a few years ago (which didn't raise enough money), but you'd think they'd send an update after releasing the actual device.

jseliger• 5 years ago

There is also https://getfreewrite.com.

tyler1094• 5 years ago

That's a good point, what is the first adressable market for such a product to gain first momentum before it can become mainstream. Those seem to be low hanging fruits:

-Writers -Coders/Terminal Users like sysadmins -DIY/Hardware Hackers/Raspberry PI/ESP32/Cyberdeck folks -Productivity Hackers -Health Tech folks -Gadget Lovers -Limited Functionality Devices for Education -Folks with medical pre-conditions who need to use eink (e.g. https://dasung-tech.myshopify.com/blogs/news/how-dasungs-e-i...)

I think there is a market, I am just surprised that we take usual monitor like eye-strain as well as the blue light for granted and haven't done anything against it for years. Even though we are having more display usage than ever.

torgoguys• 5 years ago

Yes, PaperTerm is niche, but the more you look around, the more you see people suggesting a portable terminal-only device, so I don't think the niche is all too tiny. The e-ink screen and battery life are the killer features.

Plenty of us around here basically live in the terminal and if such a device existed at a reasonable price, I think uptake would be pretty good. It presents itself as a tool, not a do-everything panacea. It could be extended in small ways to fit the distraction-free-writing crowd and the like without compromising on its killer features. Basically a tool for a few niches--sysadmins/devops, developers, embedded device communications, distraction-free writing. Put a good terminal-based browser on a server (e.g., further develop brow.sh) and it opens up a huge number of other niches.

fortran77• 5 years ago

Actually, PaperTerm + offline eBook and PDF reader would be a great compromise. It can be useful when you're connected and when you're not.

jaypeg252• 5 years ago

I'd love to see some cross between a Kindle and iPad..something focused on reading, but not necessarily books. At night I tend to browse various sites ranging from WaPo, Defector, The Athletic, and New Yorker, and others on my RSS feed and if I could do so on a simple eink tablet I'd probably reach for that more often than my phone or laptop.

Honestly if Feedly or a similar RSS reader came out with a dedicated eink reader it'd probably be a day one purchase for me, but maybe I'm in the minority.

hashmymustache• 5 years ago

Is the reMarkable 2 tablet not a fit for that? Haven’t tried it myself so not sure what its limitations are.

mattm• 5 years ago

Check out Onyx Max Lumi. It runs Android so you can install apps on it. I have the Feedly app installed and it works pretty good.

schwartzworld• 5 years ago

That describes Onyx Boox products to a tee. Full android devices with e-ink screens.

solarkraft2• 5 years ago

A friend and I have had somewhat concrete plans for a Linux (Pine64 SOPINE SoM) based e-Ink tablet for a while, but aren't as involved in supply chain stuff. Are the prices you get for orders of new screens in the same ball park as the old Kindle DX display stock? Are my fears that supply will dry up soon (in part due to new popularity) unfounded?

devmor4• 5 years ago

I've been trying to do some E-Ink stuff lately and prices seem to get higher the bigger you go and then drop off. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places, but my experience is something like:

2.5 inch display - $1

6 inch display - $400

12 inch display: $1200

36 inch display: $1400

grogenaut• 5 years ago

Where have you seen a 36" screen for $1400

jonathonlui• 5 years ago

Waveshare sells 1 to 13-inch panels for 7 to 540 USD: https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper.htm

Pixel density isn't as good as say a nice Kindle, but they are usable. I've played around with one of their 1.5 inch module

You can buy old 6" e-reader panels for ~22+ USD https://www.ebay.com/b/ed060sc4/bn_7024905630

See https://spritesmods.com/?art=einkdisplay for how to drive them.

Qwertious5• 5 years ago

FWIW a 6-inch display is available for $100ish, because that's what Kindles use.

solarkraft2• 5 years ago

Huh, the display I'm referring to seems to be less well known than I had thought. At the risk of accelerating its popularity gain: I'm talking about the 9.7" ED097OC1, which costs about 30$. (https://www.aliexpress.com/item/33007519185.html).

Sure, you can get a few, but can you get them at this price at volume or will the supply instantly dry up? Are these so cheap because it's old stock, someone got their hands on beyond life span production equipment, there's some special licensing deal with E-Ink ... ? If the price was sustainable, wouldn't everyone use this display? Or is this price what OEMs actually pay for E-Ink displays (seems unlikely)?

babyshake• 5 years ago

I've been looking for a good color e-Ink picture frame with WiFi to hack on. It seems like with component shortages this would not be possible with my target price point of $200?

seba_dos14• 5 years ago

AFAIK Inkplate (https://inkplate.io/) is supposed to get a color version later this year.

MrJagil3• 5 years ago

Is it possible that an e-ink monitor could be an incidental offspring product of this project?

I’m super eager to get one but most are either terribly small or prohibitively expensive.

I’m a sound designer. I just need to see the meters bouncing in my DAW and a reasonably updating zoom function and mouse movement. I dont need awesome fps and i dont need amazing colors. I think there’s an abundance of similar professionals. E-ink is not just for writers and coders as many seem to claim :)

seba_dos14• 5 years ago

That's a rather poor use case for e-ink screens. Bouncing meters would be pretty confusing when they blink between white and black while being updated (and an LCD would likely consume less power for that anyway), and mouse movement is pretty much the worst thing to handle for e-ink screens. I'd say that this use case is on the opposite end of usefulness spectrum for those screens than writing text or coding.

MrJagil3• 5 years ago

Ah, the refresh rate is that bad? I recently watched the preview video for dasungs new monitor and was hoping we’d be there soon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRvlJ2HjH30

skerit• 5 years ago

Yes, please! (I just want any laptop that lets me actually use it outside and not be priced ridiculously.)

tppiotrowski• 5 years ago

I heard e-ink displays use virtually no power except when they are refreshing. Say you’re running an e-ink display that refreshes 60 times per second, is it still significantly more energy efficient than an LCD?

input_sh• 5 years ago

Refresh rate on e-ink displays is still nowhere near 60x/second, so we can only guess.

Also in e-inks there's a difference between refreshing the entire screen and a part of it, depending on the implementation.

Qwertious5• 5 years ago

Say you’re running an e-ink display that refreshes 60 times per second, is it still significantly more energy efficient than an LCD?

No.

E-ink displays are more efficient because if they refresh e.g. 1 time a minute instead of 60 times a second, then they are refreshing 3600x less often. Even if they took 100x more power per refresh, they'd still end up using 36x less power overall. It gets even nuttier when you go to e.g. refreshing once a day instead of 60Hz (60 * 3600 * 24 = 5 184 000 refreshes, over FIVE MILLION).

Please note that "e-ink" is basically a blanket term and contains a dozen different technologies (although almost all the screens that are actually sold at actual stores are electrophoretic displays), it's basically a genericized term based on E-Ink Corp so anything I say here is a sweeping summary.

offtop5• 5 years ago

I'd have no problem paying 1500$ for this. As many of us age , EInk feels much better to read.

tediousdemise• 5 years ago

I’m looking forward to the day we get 60Hz and 120Hz e-ink panels.

mg• 5 years ago

I wonder if it would be possible to build a "Mobile outdoor e-ink workstation" by combining some of the shelf components:

- A Raspberry Pi

- A keyboard

- A mobile E Ink monitor

- A USB power bar

I imagine the Raspberry and the power bar in a case with two USB ports. Then one cable goes to the monitor and another to the keyboard.

This might have the additional benefit that one can put the monitor on something when working. So it is more ergonomic than looking down to a laptop.

RealStickman_• 5 years ago

IIRC pine64 aim to provide an e-ink display to accompany their next SBC.

skykooler• 5 years ago

The Raspberry Pi may be a poor choice as it does not support power management; there are other SBCs which would get significantly improved battery life when not at 100% utilization, with similar performance.

chaostheory• 5 years ago

I just want a kindle with a much larger screen. I don't care how thick or heavy it is. I would just buy a Sony if the software was better.

Solocomplex• 5 years ago

A mouse based interface is a non-starter for sure.

thescriptkiddie• 5 years ago

E Ink can do 15-30 Hz refresh rates as long as you are only updating a small portion of the screen every frame.

bogwog• 5 years ago

There's a company called Dasung which sells eink computer monitors that refresh fast enough for full-screen video playback: https://youtu.be/AeC3LIFTaho?t=249

ece2• 5 years ago

This seems perfect for editing/programming, but I'm wondering what the limitation is?

neolog3• 5 years ago

Is that a solar panel on top? Can it power the computer?

initramfs4• 5 years ago

Hi, neolog! I lead the solar/low-power OS group. The picture in the article is from a Samsung NC215S from 2011, though few, if any laptops have been made to run solar. I am researching ways to use microcontrollers to run a limited form of linux as well as drive a basic e-ink display like a solar calculator, rather than long recharging times as in the Samsung, which used an Atom cpu. In this video I was able to power a microcontroller on just indoor light: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ztj_MDNRcI I've tried to put together a laptop with a solar panel, but of course it is not yet practical: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1784621#p... Our discord group is here: https://discord.com/invite/nnxKnxh Feel free to check out our #solar & #paperterm projects!

neolog3• 5 years ago

I was able to power a microcontroller on just indoor light

Wow!

mitchs2• 5 years ago

From what I've seen working on an e-reader, a big problem for any open source e ink product is the things EIH wants to keep secret about their displays. If you want to use the nice partial refresh waveform, the open source aspect of this is going to run face first into secrecy requirements. The company selling you the display controller may be willing to build you an out of tree kernel module, and you can totally figure out what it does, but it won't be open source at that point.

robinsoh6• 5 years ago

From what I've seen working on an e-reader,
f you want to use the nice partial refresh waveform, the open source aspect of this is going to run face first into secrecy requirements. The company selling you the display controller may be willing to build you an out of tree kernel module, and you can totally figure out what it does, but it won't be open source at that point.

I'm sorry but you're making rather clearly incorrect statements which makes me suspicious of the veracity of your other comments. I'm quite familiar with their current and past technologies. You used the term "Partial refresh waveform". First of all, E Ink's active matrix electrophoretic displays like the ones in the Kindle don't need to be refreshed. That's a fundamental property. Secondly, in case you meant "partial update", that's a property of the display controller, not of the waveform. You can google this and easily see that it in fact open source and commonly utilized. https://github.com/UDOOboard/Kernel_Unico/blob/master/driver... . Most modern EPDC even the hardware ones contain that feature and it is exposed as open source.

run face first into secrecy requirements.

I'd like to see an elaboration of your claims. Please share what evidence you have about all this "secrecy". I work in the display industry, not for E Ink, and I've never heard of these things going on so it would be quite interesting for me to learn about it.

mitchs2• 5 years ago

Refresh, as in transitioning from one image to another on the display. Partial refresh as in not running the waveform on pixels that don't change color, which dramatically reduces the visual noise for the user. The problem with partial refreshes is the accumulated errors on pixels, and the effects of updating a pixel on the neighboring pixels. The longer you go between full refreshes, the more ghosted cruft you end up with on screen.

There is a waveform that specifically maintains image quality over many partial refreshes. (Interestingly it only works for black text on white backgrounds, and not the other way around, though I'd hope they would have fixed that by now.) It required quite a bit of pre-processing before you slam the frame buffers into the hardware. That logic came to us as a pre-baked kernel module from our hardware vendor, and EIH did not want us to know what was in it, though it wasn't too hard for us to figure out what it did.

And, to some extent, you can just say screw them, I'm making my own waveforms. However, a junk waveform can damage the display if they aren't correctly built to prevent static charge build up. Also, each batch of displays comes out different enough that EIH provides slightly tuned versions of the waveform on a per batch basis. I'm not sure how well the open source model will work when people don't have equivalent hardware. If someone is tuning the waveforms for their panel, that may not work for all users.

The static build up is interesting. I've seen pictures return to the display minutes after it was cleared to white because the charge built up on the display was still affecting the pigments. Never seen a display break due to it, but it was described to us as a theoretical possibility if a waveform wasn't roughly balanced in its actions.

Do I get my nerd cred now? Have I satisfied you, all knowing hacker news poster?

milkey_mouse3• 5 years ago

I have thought about building an E-ink laptop for a long time but eventually I bit the bullet and bought a reMarkable[1]. They've figured out all the difficult stuff about e-ink (did you know that to flip pixels, e-ink displays require annoyingly proprietary lookup tables of waveforms that can be up to 5-dimensional?) and worked with E-ink directly to implement said waveform table, very low-latency partial updates, and other e-ink "secrets" that could very well be worked out via reverse engineering but are otherwise under NDA. The device is also very thin, if you care about that sort of thing. The main downside is the hardware is closed source (and rather expensive, but any e-ink product not made of recycled Kindles will be).

The device comes with SSH enabled by default, with a randomly-generated password in the settings menu. Its main UI is a proprietary app, but there is a vibrant community of open-source "hacks"[2] ranging from binary patches adding features to the stock UI to a fully libre replacement OS based on Parabola[3]. Its USB port works in host mode, so you can plug in a keyboard and use it as a terminal. I've been meaning to make a nice cover for it with a built-in keyboard like the MS Surface devices.

[1] https://remarkable.com/ [2]: https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable [3]: http://www.davisr.me/projects/parabola-rm/

robinsoh6• 5 years ago

They've figured out all the difficult stuff about e-ink

They meaning Remarkable? If so, then that's marketing-speak. The simple truth is that Remarkable's products all use NXP (formerly Freescale) controllers. The Remarkable2 uses i.mx7D. That has a built-in hardware EPDC. You can google it. The driver is open source. https://github.com/UDOOboard/Kernel_Unico/blob/master/driver...

That's what does all the "difficult stuff". Not Remarkable.

did you know that to flip pixels, e-ink displays require annoyingly proprietary lookup tables of waveforms that can be up to 5-dimensional?

Yes. But you realize tables are each panel specific. Meaning every single panel you see requires a custom waveform. Nowadays they (E Ink and their partners)'re getting better and have some increased level of consistency so some waveforms can achieve the same result on whole batches of panels. But you'll still see it being batch specific. Take a waveform for one batch and try to use it on another and you'll get lousy ghosty results or maybe even damage the panel permanently.

and worked with E-ink directly to implement said waveform table, very low-latency partial updates, and other e-ink "secrets" that could very well be worked out via reverse engineering but are otherwise under NDA.

That's more marketing speak. If you look at their code which they published, https://github.com/remarkable , it is just minor patches to NXP's driver. All the hard work was done by NXP.

milkey_mouse3• 5 years ago

I suppose instead of "difficult stuff" what I should have said is "they signed E Ink's NDA and thus have access to whatever tool they use to generate waveforms, panel-specific or no." I don't mean to heap credit on Remarkable, it's just they're a Real Company™ who E Ink will talk to, and I am not. Frankly I consider getting a waveform that doesn't look bad or cause burn-in over time a more difficult achievement than an open source driver or a hardware e-ink driver (indeed, lots of SoCs have them). Hence '"secrets" that could very well be worked out via reverse engineering but are otherwise under NDA.'

The driver is open source.

Clearly, or I couldn't be running Linux-libre with it.

Challenges Building an Open-Source E Ink Laptop

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