E-ink wifi display project | Hacker News Reader

E-ink wifi display project

davidgf.net

263 pointsck279 comments

For the longest while I wanted a portable e-ink display for outdoor use (just something good enough for terminal, text editing, maybe some light browsing), but sadly nothing ever really materialized. There are larger panels available [1] but require enough low level work that nothing's ever really materialized.

There's one Chinese company that's shipping a 13.3" USB display ($1300 for the first gen [2] or $799 to pre-order a second-gen product [3]) and surprisingly enough, 10" Pixel Qi screens are also being sold, with some support for about $400 [4] or for about $150 from random Chinese retailers. [5]

Currently, the easiest/most cost effective options for getting a large e-ink display showing content are either buying a used 9.7" Kindle DX (around $150-200) and hacking VNC onto it [6] or doing running VNC on the 13.3" Onyx BOOX MAX (~$650, in short supply, it runs Android 4.0 and has wifi, BT and a pressure sensitive touchscreen/stylus so has some potential) [7]

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=8492...

[2] http://www.solcomputer.com/sol-cvs-e-ink-monitor.html

[3] http://the-digital-reader.com/2016/05/26/dasung-paperlike-e-...

[4] http://www.solcomputer.com/pixel-qi-display-2.html

[5] https://www.google.com/search?q=pixel+qi+display&oq=pixel+qi...

[6] https://tinyapps.org/docs/e-ink-monitor.html

[7] http://www.onyx-international.com/index.php/en/boox-products...

There are some interesting options coming out. Both of these are fully funded and should be out sometime in the next year.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/paperlike-world-s-first-e...

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/13-3-inch-android-e-reade...

I would love this, every time I'm reading off my Kindle I wish that it could go online so I could read blog posts and some websites. I don't like the eye strain I get after being on the computer for far too long.

Kindle does have an experimental browser that's marginally functional.

For the few days I had a Kindle before immediately losing it, I was using p2k.co to read blogposts/articles on it. Save to pocket, then use p2k to send them to the Kindle. Definitely a bit cumbersome but it worked.

This is great! Exactly what I want actually...

There are tools that let you send articles / blogs to your kindle. Check out the comfy read app on iOS, or google "send to kindle" . Obviously not the same as browsing, but still really nice

I like reading on my HP Stream 11 with Linux installed, I can run redshit and set the colour temperature of the screen really low (currently on 1800 Kelvin), and then run this command:

   echo 200 >/sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness

to set the brightness below the default minimum (change the value 200 as required)

I can comfortably read on this screen in complete darkness.

I have hotkey set for these commands.

I've been toying with the idea of using an AMOLED screen with inverted colors for reading. That should be very close to eink, as AMOLED doesn't emit any light for black.

That's a good idea. I recently put my phone screen on greyscale and inverted the colours. So much less obnoxious.

I noticed you wrote redshit. I think you meant redshift? I had a good chuckle at the very least.

Ah! Indeed. Need to watch how much beetroot I eat.

I want a large Sharp Memory LCD --- the same screen which is used on the Pebble. Colour! (Although not a huge palette.) Reflective! (Looks amazing in sunlight.) 30fps refresh rate! Consumes practically no power!

Alas, they ony go up to a 4.4 inch 320x240 model...

I saw one Dasung working, and it was pretty impressive. Refresh rate is good for CLI work. Apparently, eink can get quite quick refreshes, it's just that ebook readers try to save battery.

But it's a bit disappointing Dasung needs drivers, which are quite unstable and only available for OS X & Win 7.

I would pay serious cash for a 7"+ e-ink display that can be hooked up to a raspberry pi or laptop. Even looked at getting the chinese modules and building a driver board for them, but it was beyond my skills.

This thread shows that there's a decent market for this, someone take our money!

A good option (maybe) is getting an off-the-shelf screen like a Kindle replacement screen and building or buying a driver board for it. http://essentialscrap.com/eink/

Given screen parts like that are so available (and cheap, <$15), I'm surprised there isn't bigger market in adapting them to other display tech.

A ready-made platform is offered by Visionect - their dev kits for system integrators: https://www.visionect.com/development_kits . Meant for professional use and thus the price.

It works by using the display purely as a framebuffer, everything is rendered on server and sent over wifi/3g. It gets you amazing autonomy times and is easily powered by solar in outdoor installations.

disclaimer: founders are friends

Wow, those are really cool and pretty much what I had in mind. It's a shame that the prices are so... extravagant. I understand that they don't care about the hobby market, but it still sucks they don't have one for around $100-$150.

I wanted to create one of these out of a Kindle.

The easiest way would be to display a custom page in the Kindle's browser and use the meta refresh property to reload the page periodically. This would not have good battery life.

A better way would be a custom program running on a kindle that would: enable the wifi, load the content to be displayed from a server as an image, disable wifi, save the image as a custom screensaver, turn off until it's time to redo it. The custom screensaver is displayed with the Kindle turned off, which would lead to very good battery life. There are people building custom firmwares for the kindle, I wonder how difficult it would be to code this.

If you jailbreak your Kindle [1] running a VNC viewer [2] might be a good option as well. There are also several terminal emulators, but no X Window server: http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle_Hacks_Information

[1] http://www.epubor.com/how-to-jailbreak-kindle-paperwhite.htm...

[2] http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=150434

This guy did that (sort of, but he keeps the Kindle running): https://mpetroff.net/2012/09/kindle-weather-display/ , does the Kindle have a power-on timer?

Answer: not that difficult. Knocked this shell script together just for you. Totally untested, and as it doesn't use the screensaver the Kindle itself might stomp on it going in and out of suspend, but it should get you started.

  #!/bin/sh
  
  sleeptime=600 #seconds
  url="http://whatever/formatted-for-kindle.png"
  tmp_image="/tmp/image.png"
  
  wifienable() {lipc-set-prop com.lab126.cmd wirelessEnable 1}
  wifidisable() {lipc-set-prop com.lab126.cmd wirelessEnable 0}
  sleepfor() {lipc-set-prop -i com.lab126.powerd rtcWakeup $1}
  
  wait_for_wifi() {return `lipc-get-prop com.lab126.wifid cmState | grep CONNECTED | wc -l`;} #return true if keyword not found
  wait_for_ready_suspend() {return `powerd_test -s | grep Ready | wc -l`;}
  
  while true;
  	do wifienable
  	while wait_for_wifi; do sleep 1; done
  	wget -O $tmp_image $url
  	eips -g $tmp_image
  	wifidisable
  	while wait_for_ready_suspend; do sleep 1; done
  	sleepfor $sleeptime
  done

I'd pay real money for something like this that had an open API so you could build your own widgets or hack it to do other things.

Double bonus if it had say 3 buttons on it (or d-pad and two buttons for generic navigation).

Agreed. This has so many possible applications for me and it could only get more interesting when color e-ink finally arrives.

You can already get color e-Ink screens and not only that - they are super large (32"). Currently they are still priced a bit steep but the prices will drop. We provide development kits [1] if you want to try and build any of the applications you have in mind.

[1] https://www.visionect.com/blog/32-inch-eink-development-kit-...

If this could act as a mix between a Chromecast with screen (remote controlled browser) and a bigger smartwatch, it could be fairly useful. Pretty much an energy efficient "thin client" with some degree of autonomy.

Displio might be what you want:

http://displ.io

If they could swap out that humongous bezel for a larger screen they'd have a winner. Great link.

Edit: actually, having just read the backer comments on kickstarter you almost certainly don't want one of these. Shame.

Hmm why's that? I have one

If you look on the recent user comments they are mostly negative: * high import taxes due to the wrong paperwork * slow / unresponsive compared to promo video * buggy software * lack of customer support * one complaint of bad battery life

But they did at least ship something so that alone makes it an above average kickstarter project.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/iRex-iLiad-Book-Edition-eReader-8-1-...?

https://flair.co/products/puck - we are thinking about launching a kickstarter for an SDK and potentially an HDK (hardware developer kit)

You can. As mentioned in other comments we provide a development platform for E Ink displays that comes with open API and the ability to quickly hack together stuff using HTML.

We support WiFi, 3G and Ethernet and you can get sizes from 6" - 32". Check out our online docs [1].

[1] http://docs.visionect.com

How easy (and expensive) is it to buy OEM displays? The products you sell look cool, but seem to cater for the commercial market with economy of scale. If I want to got to EINK and buy a 6" Spectra panel, is that even possible as a hobbyist? Plastic Logic look the same.

If you look on Digikey, the best you can do is about 3-4 inches it seems. So for very simple stuff e.g. I want to add a basic non-volatile display to some sensor I've hooked up to a microcontroller, there aren't many easy options.

Access to panels is possible, you just need to find the right distributor. But getting the display is just a small part of the story. You need to build your driving electronics and figure out how to drive the display. 3-4 inches are also usually much simpler to drive, you can use a TCON and there's no waveform management, etc...

The fact that this is much harder than it seems (hardware is non-mainstream, access to documentation is limited, support is very hard to get, displays need special driving chips) actually prompted us to provide a development platform for E Ink. It took us years to figure everything out and for somebody wanting to prototype something this is a show stopper.

As far as pricing goes, the 6" panels are priced approachable, while the large displays still need to hit the mass production price points. Obviously if you buy from us in bulk we can provide you much better pricing than a price for a development kit, but E Ink is not cheap.

I like how with words like "non-mainstream hardware", "acess to documentation is limited" you make it sound like using E Ink tech is incredibly complex and that mere mortals would not be able to do it on their own. Then at the end you casually mention that your company, Visionect can help. I googled and found that you are selling $6000 devel kits. I'm curious what is the price you're getting the displays for?

I understand your frustration, I too just want access to decently priced, and various sizes of e-ink displays. From my time playing with the little adafruit displays, I also get where Visonect is coming from as a whole stack (hardware, controller, api, software) that makes it easier to just get up and going sounds pretty dang great.

I think what it comes down to for me, is I am not buying a dev kit to get hooked into an ecosystem that I don't have really clear pricing on. Which is really to bad. I think if you had a cheaper wifi only 6" model that people could afford to throw away money on just to test ideas out, then you would get way more people interested.

I made something similar, or with the similar intent at least. Turned my old sony ebook into a "wifi-display". I simply disabled sleep, opened up a website and put it in a frame.

http://fluffyelephant.com/2015/12/reuse-my-ebook-reader/

Now it shows the weather and the subway times. It also doesn't flash the entire screen when updating the subway times, because Sony optimised that in their web browser.

that looks really cool! any chance of you putting the code you used for that website somewhere?

I really want to get my hands on some flexible Color ePaper displays whenever those come out :D

Me too my friend, me too.

E-ink usage has been underwhelming/disappointing. When the technology was first announced I thought it would take the world by storm, but all we wound up with was eBook Readers and little else.

I really hope that color is the missing piece of the pie, and we'll wind up with color e-ink photo frames, LCDs in adverts displaced by color e-ink, and even secondary screens which are e-ink based.

It is such a cool technology, almost zero energy use between updates, that has been ignored and under-used. It legitimately makes me sad.

I guess nobody wanted to be that "dated" manufacturer who used a black & white screen on something in 2016, no matter what the benefits.

I think the best use case is overlay screens particularly for backpacking or travel--really anytime battery is a concern.

For academia, a decent A5 or A4 b&w eink would be good enough and probably a game changer. It's very disappointing Kindle DX was discontinued and nothing replaced it. Now we have a Sony and an Onyx. Let's see if things improve...

Even with color, it just won't be anywhere as good as the screens we're used to now.

There are two things holding E-Ink back: 1) Battery life alone is not worth the tradeoff for the consumer market. 2) The flexibility of the form factor could've taken E-Ink places that others couldn't go, but: a. The company makes it very difficult for startups to work with them on non-stock sizes/shapes. b. The manufacturing process hasn't improved enough to bring the promised cost within reach.

All the R&D money in the display industry is being invested elsewhere, and people will get affordable, flexible, and high-contrast OLED screens sooner than E-Ink can check off two of those boxes.

OLED has several downsides as well like burn in problems, limiting lifetime, higher power usage, doesn't work that well outside in bright sunlight, etc. I always avoided OLED and choose either IPS or e-ink.

I suspect that color isn't the main limiter, money is. Once (if) it gets down to $1 per A5-size-screen, they'll be plastered everywhere.

We're changing that and helping E Ink to break through into digital signage and there's actually a lot happening in this segment.

You have bus stops, buses, traffic signs, museum labels, room booking signage, smart digital prices, buildings, queueing systems, outdoor ad panels,...

Check our blog for some examples: http://blog.visionect.com

Great and all.

But

> smart digital prices

End consumer will hate you. One of the worst ideas ever.

"Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."

Very nice. This kind of thing has been on my vaporware todo list for a while. I'm glad someone just did it. I really like your frame builder concept.

Where would someone with zero hardware experience start to work on projects like this?

I have a vision of a modern sticky note powered by your phone that can relay information to this type of small, e-ink display. But I have no idea how to go about developing it... any pointers?

You could try using our development kit [1] which is a production ready version of OPs system.

[1] https://www.visionect.com/development_kits

Maybe SeeNote [1] could be what you are looking for. Only preorder now, but looks really nice. I would really like give it a go, but I don't like preorders. [1] https://www.getseenote.com

This is exactly what I want to build but not something I want to buy.

The reason is because I feel like SeeNote is overkill, like they took the elegant idea of modernizing the sticky note and added things like weather and prompts for no apparent reason.

If I could build a stripped-down version of this myself, that would be ideal. I just don't have any clue where to start.

Nobody does, because there is no open source "visionect", but there really should be. They have put in the work to make a simple stack (dev kit) for working with the tech, but you can't just borrow that stack and source cheap panels. I would say the market is wide open for someone to do what they are doing, but crowd fund it, open source the controllers, hardware, software etc

Why remove the SD socket? It makes sense to get rid of the NAND to cut down on power but it seems like the SD socket could be useful and that STM32 has a built-in SDIO controller.

I'm very impressed that you managed to create a nice DIY replica of our development kit. https://www.visionect.com/development_kits

We do the same in our Visionect Platform - a server component streams images to a WiFi, 3G or ETH enabled E-Ink device. We do sizes from 6" (proper device in casing) to 32" (in color as well).

Super neat stuff, looks like you guys have a solution that fills a big gap (the big disconnect is that you have hardware hackers who don't build up the stack or high level devs who have things they want to build but don't want to bring up panels to do it).

What's the refresh rate/interactivity/frame rate for your devices? Looks like you guys have lots of awesome options - are there videos of the devices in action or the dev environment?

Are the high prices of devkits primarily driven by the panel cost or for other reasons?

Refresh rate: ~750 ms for 4 bit and up to ~125 ms for 1 bit

Videos of device in action: https://www.visionect.com/blog/kindle-users-can-your-reader-... (our previous generation device)

High prices are driven due to price of screens and the amount of support we provide. It's a development kit, intended for customers building products. We're not that much of DIY (like a hacked Kindle or the OPs solution), but rather a production ready solution that you can use to prototype and later deploy in field. Examples [1], [2], [3]:

[1]: https://www.visionect.com/blog/joan-honored-for-its-eco-desi... [2]: https://www.visionect.com/blog/smart-shelf-labels-on-electro... [3]: https://www.visionect.com/blog/electronic-paper-at-london-bu...

Really interesting product selection - obviously on the pricey end when the market here is looking for hacky project type prices, but an open version of Joan for people to get playing with your stack at that £299/$350 price point might work for feeding dev support further up the chain?

We tried that previously, but it didn't work out. People that want a cheap version, still complained about the price and suggested a hacked Amazon Kindle as a viable alternative.

Fair enough! Though if you ever did want to explore that again, I'd be interested in a more entry-level to prototype some signage ideas (email in profile).

So cool. Wish the Raspberry Pi foundation came up with a Pi0 compatible e-ink display. I get the hacking fun part but it would be so nice.

Don't know if you saw this - https://www.pi-supply.com/product/papirus-zero-epaper-screen.... I get that it is not from the foundation but it is Pi0 compatible.

off-topic: gangadhargs, FYI, your comments are shown as [dead] (since about four years ago).

(apparently no longer)

Like this?

https://www.pi-supply.com/product/papirus-epaper-eink-screen...

Well as the STM32F103ZE has some external memory connected to it (hopefully several MB of it), you could get Linux running on it directly - who needs a Raspberry Pi ;)

E-ink seems very underused. What I want is a smartwatch whose face is just an e-ink display with a single, mechanical hand on top. With those I can program the face and hand motion myself. Rarely updating the face to save as much power as possible yet cheap always on display from the physical hand.

Too bad this never amounted to anything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwGO2Ky-b8k

A "third screen" e-ink monitor would be great.

here you go — https://tinyapps.org/docs/e-ink-monitor.html

Kindle DX is from 2008/09!

we are doing something similar (ESP and Eink) but wrapped up in a nice package and (for now) focused on sensors/controls. we are considering an sdk and hdk possibly to open it up for some custom applications/builds/apps

https://flair.co/products/puck

I dream of a lightweight e-ink typewriter. Sometimes I want to write without all the distraction of the "normal" devices.

Sounds like what you want is a TRS-80 model 100:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100

Though maybe it's not quite as light as you were hoping (at least, not by modern standards)

You might want one of these, then: https://getfreewrite.com/

$500 for a mechanical keyboard strapped to an eink display. Syncs with Dropbox. Sounds right up your alley.

Funny how they define it as a hardcore device for professional/serious use, and then define 'typical usage' as 30 minutes per day for purposes of being able to claim a seemingly absurdly long battery life.

But I guess "about 15 hours" sounds a lot less impressive than "3-4 weeks".

I'm actually intrigued by the concept but sweet jebus that thing is ugly.

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