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Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

Nice. I'd like to see e-ink continue to develop.

What I want is an e-ink laptop with simple but good word processing, coding, text-mostly browsing, emails and such.

I like my reader. It doesn't feel like "device" and I'm much more relaxed using it. Im on my third one and all three were on airplane mode since the day I bought them. Reading on tablet/phone triggers my hyperactive "device mode". Checking emails, hn, tinder, contol-tab, notifications, Twitter, youtube... Not good before bed. e-ink just lends to relaxed focus, for me. The battery life also helps me forget it's a device.

An e-ink laptop built for working on stuff with fewer distractions, 20+ hrs battery life, decent text editing and word processing, emails... I want.

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I've actually been working on something of this sort with a battery-powered Raspberry PI running Debian and a Pervasive 7-inch e-Paper display. I whipped up a pretty decent prototype that had a terminal (so, Emacs, w3m, newsbeuter, etc.), PDF reader, and rough support for keyboard-driven X apps, but then my little girl got to the wiring with scissors, and my momentum died. (It also had a small character LED display to show rapid feedback while typing.)

The last few days I've been working on a new version of the software, and I think I'll wire it back up. If I get it clean enough for others to use, I'll write it up.

Looking forward to more information about this as well. I'm thinking about wiring up an e-Paper display to a Pi for some digital signage applications and curious how you got it all to work, and the prices for doing so!

I used a 7.4" display from Pervasive, about $50USD. It's a simple development board with an easy to drive controller. All the software was in Python, with a few performance-critical bits in Cython. I used wire wrapping to hook things up, and it was not difficulty, even though I'm a programmer with no previous hardware experience.

Ditto, very interested. You wouldn't happen to have any photos of the prototype, would you?

I have at least a photo of emacs running on a very early version, but it's not representative of what I eventually arrived at. I'll see if I can dig it up.

Would love to know more!

I'll submit a Show HN when I get to a point to do so.

This sounds really cool! Does this project have a name?

The Papertop. (It's a working title.)

Have you written any kind of blog or documentation about the build? I've been interested in a mini-laptop e-ink solution for a while. I think that most of the coding I do takes very little resources and is primarily just talking to the cloud or other servers. No reason to lug around a bunch of resources I don't need, right?

I haven't, and I'm disappointed to see that the display I used is now discontinued. That will push me to use a more effective one in the next iteration, which I'll write up.

PaperPi?

I desperately want a solution for working outside. E-ink would be absolutely awesome. Unfortunately I don't see anything on the horizon. Even the devices that will work as monitors described in the sibling posts would be problematic because they are simply too big. I need something I can put in my bag and go. I guess I'll have to wait until the rest of society catches up with my nomad-work existence :-)

Seconded. Runner up was the Pixel Qi style screen that was in the OLPC, but everything about that appears to be dead.

The OLPC’s screen was pretty cool in black and white and was quite usable in full sun. It also was fast in a way that epaper wasn't.

In color mode, it was pretty muted, and the resolution was... commensurate with those of the time period. But, I imagine that things would have eventually improved. Kind of a shame the whole thing seems to have dead-ended.

I had my hopes on mirasol[1] but they seem to have given up on the technology due to low yields.

Imagine a laptop with this technology.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1xEuR2mLh8

CLEARink looks pretty promising. Well see if that translates to actual devices using it or end up like Mirasol, Liquavista etc.

I would instantly buy a laptop like that. Heck, I'll even settle for a good tablet + keyboard combo at this point.

I dunno. This might make e-ink a viable LCD replacement eventually but for the device above, I'm ok with the current hardware. What I want is form factor (laptop) and appropriate OS/UI.

Absolutely. A tablet + e-ink laptop would be my ideal travel pair. Laptop for work or recreational writing, tablet (or phone) for entertainment. I prefer to keep those separate anyway.

Feels like Emacs would be perfect for e-ink since by default it doesn't really do any scrolling or "dynamic"/moving-across-screen stuff

Yup. A lot of old timey UIs could work well.

Dasung and Boox are working on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj2Lvuc28k0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pw-oCItgx8

I would 100% buy this. I make lots of business trips that are 36 hours long. I have to take my laptop because some emails and documents just aren't conducive to handling on my phone. But a lightwieght and thin laptop style device with crazy good battery? And all it does is email, documents, and text browsing? Definitely would buy that and stuff it in my bag for these trips.

The old HP Omnibook was pretty close. Monochrome screen with an advertised 8 hours of battery life, solid state storage, at a time when conventional laptops struggled to get two hours.

I think a huge untapped market is digital signage. For anyone who needs to display a load of text and have it be perfectly legible in bright light, giant e-ink screens would be perfect. Large-scale LEDs that look good in bright lights cost a fortune and use a ton of power.

I also prefer an e-ink reader for reading. Still using the same Kindle Touch that I bought used probably 5 years ago. Probably charge it once a month, and don't have to worry about blue light before bed.

Out of curiosity, what brand of reader do you use?

Atm, a Kindle paperwhite. I also had two Kobos previously. Honestly, any small ereader is as good as the next one, for me. All I need it to do is turn pages. A backlight is sometimes nice, but not essential.

One with the same screen as the Pebble watches, but bigger, would be nice. Coding without color wouldn't be fun.

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