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Comment by sk0g | Hacker News Reader

I've wanted an e-ink display for a while, to display persistent-ish information for a while, like the Premier League table, local weather forecasts, and upcoming events from my Google Calendar, all in one screen.

Unfortunately, they tend to be quite pricey and small, and I can't find pricing on this anywhere.

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Last time I looked into this, for a potential project, I found Waveshare seem to be the leaders for the hacker/hobby space.

They’ve got a nice 12.5” display (1304x984) @ $170, which is pricey but big enough for league tables.

https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/12.48inch-e-paper...

The refresh times on waveshare panels are bad enough to make them useless for most interesting applications. That particular panel takes 16s to refresh.

Hi,

Paperd.Ink has a refresh rate of 4s for full refresh and <1s for partial. We're working on lowering it further.

16s would be for a full refresh though. If you're making an information based display you might only need to change a small area per update, which would be faster (though I couldn't find. any refresh speed in the datasheet).

WaveShare supplied code only allows full resolution full refresh with half tones and everything.

IIRC someone figured how to expedite it but that someone had to.

Because it has 3 colors. Sometimes you can put them in two colors. For the Pwnagotchi project, the consensus has been that the Waveshare B&W v2 is the best [1].

Based on my own experience (I have one) I can say it has a high enough refresh rate, and little ghosting (none is impossible as costs too much battery to do full refresh).

Also, the UPS Lite, also from China (AliExpress or whatever), is excellent.

Do keep in mind this is a specific/different project, with a much smaller screen, meant to be portable (for on the go).

[1] https://pwnagotchi.ai/installation/#color-vs-black-white-e-i...

That one has red as well as black. They have a bunch more, mostly standard monochrome (a bit cheaper, and probably faster to update): https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/epaper-1....

I bought a Nook e-reader off ebay a while back for something like this. You can root it and it's just Android 2.2 underneath. Not a fantastic dev platform, but my plan was to just have it display images, and all the real work is done on a server somewhere.

I saw this product a couple of days ago: https://sync-sign.com/eink-for-developers-turn-key-solution/...

I am not affiliated with that company in any way.

This reminds me of that old SNL commercial for Newton post-it notes.

Try Inkplate. Uses a good screen (recycled Kindle) and has a battery charger built in. Very cheap. Only just funded though: https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6

This is an amazing idea that I am coming across for the first time! I wonder if there is already some implementation of it for Kindle!

Edit: just found out this project.

https://github.com/pjimenezmateo/kindle-wallpaper

Hey,

Thanks for the info, will definitely check it out. You can fill in our form if you'd like.

Take care!

Please stop spamming this same sentence in response to comments.

I built one of these with a kindle + rust - https://github.com/davidhampgonsalves/life-dashboard

The version of the e-reader is important if you want to access deep sleep / RTC for lower power usage.

This is awesome! I love how this is independent of setting up your own server. I wish there were a little bit of more documentation though - I am unsure if this will work on my kindle (PaperWhite 2015).

It says crowdfunding coming soon. Most likely the price is TBD.

We're looking at a selling price of around $59 currently. We're checking for financing options in addition to crowdfunding.

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