Show HN: A 13.3" battery-powered e-paper picture frame to display digital art

https://blog.framelabs.eu/evolution/

by clash • 5 years ago

64 53 5 years ago

blog.framelabs.eu

pmorici• 5 years ago

For that price I would expect a much nicer frame. Looks like it is plastic.

clash10• 5 years ago

Nope, no plastics at all whatsoever. It is high quality aluminum. Solid wood is also possible on request.

notRobot• 5 years ago

These are beautiful. But also ridiculously expensive.

clash10• 5 years ago

Thanks! Unfortunately, the purchasing cost of the large e-paper displays is by far the biggest cost factor.

rbanffy• 5 years ago

It always shocks me how much the cost of those panels holds adoption back. I’d love an A4 epaper reader, but I don’t want to pay what they cost at the moment.

shannifin• 5 years ago

Too expensive for me, but love the idea, they look awesome!

loloquwowndueo• 5 years ago

Too expensive. Can probably buy several dozen nice color prints for that price and swap them manually. Sure you lose the tech / geek factor but for that eye-watering cost, I think it’s worth it.

clash10• 5 years ago

Maybe I should think about building a mechanical version ;)

throwanem3• 5 years ago

Now, that, I might go for. Especially if it makes a noise like an old flip clock when the images change. :)

dmitrygr7• 5 years ago

350 euros for 6 inch? 450 for 9 inch‽‽

Just buy some very cheaply-available electronic price tags [1] and use open-source firmware[2] which supports greyscale + yellow. Save literally HUNDREDS of dollars/euros/etc. For extra credit, they are not only black and white eInk screens, they are BWY, so they can add a splash of yellow!

[1] https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?LH_Auction=0&_nkw=Chroma74

[2] http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=29.%20eInk%20Price%20Ta...

clash10• 5 years ago

If you just want to display information, I agree. Black/White & red/yellow is enough. But if you want to display a photo, you need gray shades.

dmitrygr7• 5 years ago

Read that article... greys are working just fine...

I know that most people assume that BWY and BWR screens cannot do greys, but that is wrong

HWR_143• 5 years ago

Very interesting. Do you know of even bigger price tag models to search for? Is it as easy as the second page makes it seem?

And, separate question, but I tried just scanning [2] and I'm having trouble understanding how to determine the resolution of the tags in [1].

dmitrygr7• 5 years ago

640x384 for those

it is that easy - i wrote that article

bigger ones are rare but do exist

frio• 5 years ago

Very HN question, but are they hackable? I'd love one of these as a daily calendar; I've used an old/decrepit Kindle before for the same sort of thing, but something like this would be much more attractive.

I could assemble something myself, I guess, but I've got other projects taking up time and don't mind paying a little bit to turn the physical assembly problem (I'm bad at) into a mostly software problem (I'm mildly better at).

clash10• 5 years ago

You can configure the device to connect to you local WiFi and fetch images from wherever. Sample code for an image server is available at https://github.com/framelabs-eu/imageserver

eyegor2• 5 years ago

For people complaining about price, large eink panels are insanely expensive. The cheapest 13.3" panel with a min order of 1 is around $400-450. That's for a panel with no driver board. If you're interested in an easy diy approach, you can pick up a 10" panel with an arduino hat here for $200 [0]. Although if you step down to normal ereader sizes, you can easily pick up 6-7" panels for around $30 on aliexpress/ebay.

[0] https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/epaper-1/...

dmitrygr7• 5 years ago

except they are charging 350 euro even for 6 inch, and you can buy a hackable 7.4 inch panel WITH a radio mcu/ battery/ case/ etc... for $40

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?LH_Auction=0&_nkw=Chroma74

eyegor2• 5 years ago

I mean sure if you don't mind the fact that ESLs tend to have horrible resolution. The chroma 74 you linked, for example, only displays 640x384 for a 7.4" panel. Good pick if they work for your application.

clash10• 5 years ago

If you want to hack it and don't want to pay for consumer grade quality for neither hardware nor software, then the device you linked is a good choice.

solarkraft3• 5 years ago

You can get old stock of the 9,7" panel at around 30$ each.

squintychino• 5 years ago

Can you provide some links where I could get this? I would be interested at this price point.

denysvitali• 5 years ago

Reminds me of that time someone posted a similar project with an e-ink display showing the current newspaper... and the screen itself was over 3k

dtolnay• 5 years ago

I would love a SIM variation of this -- where instead of uploading pictures via the frame's wifi hotspot, I could send the frame to grandparents and upload online and they'd get downloaded onto the frame via international SIM card.

clash10• 5 years ago

If your grandparents have WiFi at home, you can do exactly that. There is a mode to periodically fetch images from a remote URL.

solarkraft3• 5 years ago

I love e-ink and these look really cool, but yeah, that price. Where are you currently getting your displays? You may be interested in EPDiy [0] (controlling cheap left over Kindle DX screens with an ESP32) and Inkplate [1] for some inspiration on cheaper sourcing.

For reference: the 6" Inkplate costs around 100€ and I think you could fairly comfortably build a 10" EPDiy device at around that. That's without all the fanciness of course, with it I reckon it should be possible to sell these things at around 200€ each, which would probably make them a lot more interesting to people.

That said: I'm excited for color e-ink screens appearing on the market. The amount of devices released lets me hope at least some will make it to a secondary market.

[0] https://hackaday.io/project/168193-epdiy-976-e-paper-control... [1]: https://inkplate.io/

clash10• 5 years ago

I actually have an Inkplate at home. The 8 gray shades they support are unfortunately not evenly distributed, which makes it difficult to display images in good quality.

EPDiy looks interesting, though.

KMnO4• 5 years ago

What does it do for shades that aren’t those 8? Does it apply any sort of dithering?

Maybe it just needs a better lookup table or some preprocessing.

I’ve seen some impressive 1-bit displays, so 8 shades shouldn’t be harder than that.

throwanem3• 5 years ago

That is surprisingly good contrast. Better than I've ever seen e-ink displays produce, and I have on occasion been looking - I'm a photographer and enjoy hanging my own work, and it would be convenient to do so this way.

On the other hand, for the same price as the 13.3" version and at the same size, I could print and frame approximately 80-100 photos, even from my gallery-quality inkjet - if I take the quality hit and use the HP AIO where the ink is free, that's about 200-250. (At that point it mainly depends on what kind of bulk rate I can get on the frames!)

So the unit economics don't really work out in favor of the ArtFrame here, I feel like. I wish they did!

Izmaki• 5 years ago

I was convinced i wanted one as well, until i saw the price. Sadly.

tedmiston• 5 years ago

Saving people some clicks:

- ArtFrame 6″ - 349,00 €

- ArtFrame 9.7″ - 449,00 €

- ArtFrame 13.3″ - 899,00 € – 999,00 €

https://framelabs.eu/en/artframes/

ngcc_hk• 5 years ago

Wonder as only 16 level of grey. If that enough?

dmitrygr7• 5 years ago

with just greys (no color) and dithering, 16 greys is plenty

soared2• 5 years ago

A very relevant thread from four months ago about why e-ink is so insanely expensive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143407

robinsoh2• 5 years ago

"e-ink is so insanely expensive"

What do you mean? What specific type of display, what size of display, what volume and what is the price? I keep hearing this claim about "insanely expensive" , "patent troll" and every time I've asked simple questions like which patent, what lawsuits, what prices, I've never gotten a satisfactory reply. Please have a look at my comment history, I believe the prices of electrophoretic displays are directly linked to their volumes. The displays in use in high volume products are cheap while those hand kerfed large panels are a couple of orders of magnitude higher cost since their volumes a couple of orders of magnitude lower.

I also already asked in that thread for any form of substantiation and never got a reply. It is weird to see that exact specific comment linked to again and again. Boing boing linked to that comment, multiple blog posts linked to that comment and used it as a citation claiming E Ink is evil. Well, I don't know if they are or not, but something more concrete than a throwaway comment and a self-referential insane infinite loop of comments would be necessary for me to form an opinion.

soared2• 5 years ago

Mmmmm in comparison to normal displays they are really expensive, that’s pretty much all anyone is getting at. I can get a regular sized 1080p display for like $50, and the same size would be 10x for e-ink. The price is more for good reasons like you’ve explained, but still just high in comparison.

kseistrup2• 5 years ago

Are the listed dimensions correct?

On the https://framelabs.eu/en/technische-daten/ page both the 6″ and the 9.7″ is listed as being 222×309 mm, which is roughly the size of DIN A4.

On the https://framelabs.eu/en/artframes/ page, however, there's a clear difference in size between all models.

Could you check the sizes, please?

clash10• 5 years ago

The written sizes are correct. By default I will manufacture the two smaller displays with the same frame dimensions. The small device in the comparison image is from a custom order, which allows for a better size comparison. For custom orders I can create the frames in arbitrary sizes accurate to a millimeter. I'll add a note.

kseistrup2• 5 years ago

Oh, ok. Thanks for the clarification.

jonplackett• 5 years ago

I made a photo frame for my mum out of my old iPad, just found a frame the right size and stuck it around the edge. So long as you keep it plugged in it works great. The family just adds images to a shared iCloud library and they appear on there automatically, in full color, and it cost me just the frame and not getting the pitiful recycling / resale fee for an old iPad.

chrisstu• 5 years ago

I can't help wondering just how small the market is for a 13.3" panel at 900 Euros. I would guess there are less than 100 customers.

Show HN: A 13.3" battery-powered e-paper picture frame to display digital art

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