Building a simple e-ink display from scratch

Recently, I tried to contact E-Ink, hoping to get information for an architectural use of some of their supposed products. I couldn't get any real information, conceptual pricing, development kit, summary of capabilities, or anything useful out of their sales staff. I repeatedly explained, I am a well capitalized entrepreneur wanting to incorporate some of their tech into my properties at scale, and that I have a development and construction team ready to work to design and integrate a product for various uses. I my mind, I should be a good potential tech development partner, ready to waste money on their tech. I couldn't get anything useful out of them. I am now convinced that outside of the very basic amazon kindle reader screen type displays, that the technology does not exist as promised or marketed.

One of my favorite stories about genetic algorithms is how they made an e ink display work. Taken from a Stack Overflow thread:

>In January 2004, I was contacted by Philips New Display Technologies who were creating the electronics for the first ever commercial e-ink, the Sony Librie, who had only been released in Japan, years before Amazon Kindle and the others hit the market in US an Europe.

>The Philips engineers had a major problem. A few months before the product was supposed to hit the market, they were still getting ghosting on the screen when changing pages. The problem was the 200 drivers that were creating the electrostatic field. Each of these drivers had a certain voltage that had to be set right between zero and 1000 mV or something like this. But if you changed one of them, it would change everything.

>So optimizing each driver's voltage individually was out of the question. The number of possible combination of values was in billions,and it took about 1 minute for a special camera to evaluate a single combination. The engineers had tried many standard optimization techniques, but nothing would come close.

>The head engineer contacted me because I had previously released a Genetic Programming library to the open-source community. He asked if GP/GA's would help and if I could get involved. I did, and for about a month we worked together, me writing and tuning the GA library, on synthetic data, and him integrating it into their system. Then, one weekend they let it run live with the real thing.

>The following Monday I got these glowing emails from him and their hardware designer, about how nobody could believe the amazing results the GA found. This was it. Later that year the product hit the market.

>I didn't get paid one cent for it, but I got 'bragging' rights. They said from the begining they were already over budget, so I knew what the deal was before I started working on it. And it's a great story for applications of GAs. :)

I wonder what the current situation with e-ink is.

From my point of view,current e-ink displays have not really improved significantly in terms of resolution and refreshing speed. Where are the current difficulties with the technology?

I remember the difficulty of making larger, highly monodisperse SiO2/polymer particle spheres in the end of the 90s. But I believe this problem was overcome long ago.

So is it the electronic/particle interface that is problematic e.g. size of "pixels"/sphere clusters?

For those who would just like to use an EPD of reasonable size and price, the "official" development kits etc. are extremely expensive (likely due to the IP/patents discussed in some of the comments here) but others have figured out how to drive the panels you can find cheaply as replacements for e-book readers:

http://essentialscrap.com/eink/

In the usual applications these are driven by a dedicated controller (another big chunk of IP and thus $$), but it's easy enough to generate the signals with a regular microcontroller --- there's literally no minimum refresh rate, so the timing requirements are not high --- and it also gives you more control over the actual pixel whitening/darkening, allowing such things as grayscale and incremental updates:

https://hackaday.io/project/11537-nekocal-an-e-ink-calender

I feel that the displays in the Pebble watches (ie Sharp's memory LCDs [1]) are a much better alternative to LCDs than e-ink. Their power consumption is in the uW range with more than 30fps refresh rate.

[1] https://www.sharpsma.com/products?sharpCategory=Memory%20LCD

I wish I could buy a small and light E ink typewriter. Size of iPad mini, but with a keyboard, and stiff enough to be used on my laps.

Nice, I was researching that very topic the other day.

Note that making a DIY LCD, on the other hand, seems fairly manageable: http://hackaday.com/2016/06/17/how-to-make-a-custom-lcd-from...

Android-based e-ink typewriter and slates from 6" - 13":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14123060

Does anyone know what device is used to change image on e-ink pricetags? I know that there are some wireless ones, but I imagine that wired should be cheaper and better for hacking.

Those pricetags are pretty cheap. And on Ali Express they sell those 3 color ones. Maybe it would be possible to use them to make some fun keyboard?

The moment I can buy an 8.5"x11" display I'll be happy with eink stuff. I'd probably build a Pi Zero E-Reader. Without 8.5"x11" paper there's no point for the kind of things I'd want to read.

Meanwhile I use an original OLPC XO-1 as an e-reader. It has a beatiful 200 ppi color/transflective display. Such a shame that Pixel Qi is no more.

Does anybody think having a gigantic e-ink desktop monitor would be rad for coding? The refresh rate might be a killer, but I wonder how your eyes would feel after 8 hours compared to an conventional monitor.

Sort of related question I've always had:

What is the highest resolution non-color display? I.e. are there '4K' versions of things like e-ink? It seems like most of these things are sort of pixelated looking.