Sydney’s solar-powered e-paper traffic signs report zero failures since 2013

It'll be like sitting on an old school workstation again, more focus, less distraction and still have modern underlying hardware.

I think it's because e-reader screens are made on a glass substrate, and a large, thin glass screen in a large, thin, plastic device frame is going to be difficult to reinforce so that it doesn't break. There have been a couple of attempts to manufacture plastic-backed e-reader screens – I recall Plastic Logic from Cambridge a few years back, who were going to make an A4 e-reader but struggled to scale up the technology, and shifted to licensing.

E-Ink have just recently got their technology into production, called Mobius, but they haven't yet caught on in retail devices yet (given the market is mostly a walled garden quasi-monopoly, in practice I mean Amazon haven't used them in Kindles yet). Hopefully when the technology becomes mainstream it will remove some constraints on e-readers, and they'll become thinner, more robust, and easier to produce in large sizes. And hopefully alongside that we'll also get some competition in the e-reader market, and devices which are more open.

The HN discussion has some good arguments about whether the startup can deliver what they say they can or not. Healthy scepticism combined with some signs they really might be able to. I decided to pre-order after reading this thread, and I hope my money isn't gone ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13113819

Point is, if real, it looks fantastic.

I noticed that the module I purchased last year for development ED060SC4 has become quite a lot more expensive on eBay but is still pretty cheaply available on Alibaba, the issue I forsee having is that the screens have edges which will create gaps in the image, might not be too noticable in a sufficiently large array if the virtual image is larger to account for the gaps in the physical display.

There's also the ED097OC1 which is much larger but I think would still suffer from the edge problem and I'm not sure what the price is at medium scale (10s of units).

Please e-mail me if you have a source on these parts or larger tileable panels!

These are fun[0] but no sign of additional screens.

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[0] - https://hackaday.com/category/kindle-hacks/

Can you elaborate on this? I've considered buying one of these things since the price dropped from $1k to $700, but if I can't read and annotate PDFs without pointless barriers it's useless to me.

So far, this seems to only be used for parking signs, where visibility isn't as much of a concern.

The fact that they don't break down is just a further testament to e-paper's versatility - we'll see more and more applications using e-paper in digital signage. There's a lot of examples what our customers are building on our blog, like smart citizen information (https://www.visionect.com/blog/soofa-sign-reinventing-citysc...) or trucks equipped with digital signs (https://www.visionect.com/blog/electronic-paper-truck-displa...).

Judging by their posts on this page, the company that manufactures the signs is clearly hooked up to an IV drip of their own koolaid. Still, for this particular application (temporary parking restrictions) e-paper is much better than the previous solution, which was to print plastic inserts and drive around the city sliding them into tracks on the signs.

Also normal road signs use retro reflective spheres mixed into the paint to increase brightness at night, not sure if those can be carried over to e-ink displays?