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:
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 60 minutes ago [-]
Agree, and for those who aren't aware, these grants are available to anyone, not limited to Netherlands residents: https://nlnet.nl/NGI0/
tonyhart7 14 minutes ago [-]
"EU financially supporting this project."
wdym about EU funding this project, I see backer list and there are bunch of US citizen
lemonberry 28 minutes 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.
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 2 hours 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.
I wish that someone would use an updated (high-resolution) one to make a battery-powered tablet which uses a Wacom EMR stylus.
Igrom 56 minutes ago [-]
Can you showcase the cyberdeck? I've found a post by you on Twitter, but I don't know if you demo it elsewhere.
lagniappe 50 minutes ago [-]
I use a similar setup :) Have you done a blog post or anything?
RossBencina 46 minutes 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.
perching_aix 27 minutes ago [-]
Really impressed by how fast epaper is these days, but the demo video really doesn't look refresh rate compliant at 60 Hz.
Escapade5160 1 hours 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.
sandos 4 hours 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!
bbarnett 3 hours 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.)
dspillett 2 hours 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 1 hours ago [-]
they didn't, they even said something like "lol we don't care, we will never make things open source".
RossBencina 56 minutes ago [-]
The dev kit works with most if not all eink panels. You are not limited to the panels shipped in this launch.
Damn shame, because otherwise they look brilliant, I would have wanted one. Thanks for the warning.
DrJaws 1 hours ago [-]
boox devices are not even close to 75hz though
not even the latest ones like tab x c
foolswisdom 2 hours ago [-]
Can you tell us more about the phoning home?
DrJaws 1 hours 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.
swinglock 4 hours 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.
porridgeraisin 4 hours ago [-]
What about syntax highlighting?
camgunz 2 hours ago [-]
I built a colorscheme for Vim [0] that is close to monochrome when I was worried about blue light (I've since had kids and now this kind of worry doesn't rate at all), and I basically use bold and highlights (I hate underlining, italics, and squiggles, but I think you can do all that too in the GUI version). I found it surprisingly usable.
You have the option of a few greyscale levels, bold, pehaps italic, and depending on font maybe extra-bold and light. That should be enough for the essentials, though it will feel like a downgrade if you have got used to a richly colourful environment and rely on it for reasons other than liking it being pretty.
swinglock 3 hours 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 3 hours 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 3 hours ago [-]
I like your idea better.
OJFord 3 hours 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.
3abiton 3 hours ago [-]
That indeed would be my issue with it for programming.
qwertytyyuu 6 minutes ago [-]
75hz woah
torium 2 hours 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 1 hours ago [-]
It’s obviously the left one. I don’t see much glare on it.
torium 1 hours ago [-]
You don't see the glare on the left hand side? Are you trolling me?
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://gitlab.com/zephray/caster
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.
wdym about EU funding this project, I see backer list and there are bunch of US citizen
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42135520
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.
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.
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.)
It is fully open, the full source code, gateware and hardware designs are on github: https://github.com/Modos-Labs/Glider
not even the latest ones like tab x c
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.
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.
[0]: https://github.com/camgunz/amber
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.
Much more variation than that with 256 colours is mostly just making it pretty rather than offering helpful distinction imo.
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!!
https://imgur.com/AsMMNmi
https://imgur.com/a/kHBiPmu