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Comment by peter_d_sherman | Hacker News Reader

Excerpt:

"e-Paper displays have great readability under sunlight, and only consume power when updated. But their refresh rate is limited, and most displays are fairly expensive."

I've been searching for a tiny computer / screen combination that would work under absolute minimal power; that is, if you were in deep space (or in the deep wilderness), and only had a small (say, 5W or less) solar panel for power, then what tiny computer / screen / keyboard combination would you use?

Well, this screen seems like it might be ideally suited to be the screen component of a setup like that...

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I had one of these back in the mid-90s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poqet_PC

It did a lot of trickery, like suspending the CPU between keystrokes, to get a weeks “work” (I was 12) out of it running on two AA batteries.

Jailbreak a kindle. They are super low power and cheap with lots of features - I’m guessing a 5W solar panel would be overkill if you only update the screen irregularly.

Came here to say this. I've been playing with doing some development on one, but the kernel must be really old now. Do you happen to know whether there's a way to update it?

On that note... The remarkable sipposidly allows access for writing software (I think their dev documentation leaves something to desired..). Might also be an option.

Ed: https://remarkable.engineering/

Or better yet, get an Android tablet with an eInk screen. Power consumption will be greater, but assuming the screen isn't refreshed constantly, 5W should still be enough to keep it going.

Also consider Kobo devices which may be slightly more hackable.

I'd want to check this before committing, but my understanding is that e-ink is cheap power-wise because it doesn't require power to maintain the image - actually changing the image, though, is more expensive than LCDs or OLEDs, so if you try to, say, watch a video on an e-ink screen, you're going to get worse energy draw than an LCD display.

Also this is 0.2fps. (or 0.25fps for the smaller one).

Could also try a Sharp Memory LCD. Faster refresh rates and pretty low power consumption depending on usage pattern. Here's an article of someone using it with an ESP32: https://hackaday.com/2020/01/07/how-low-can-an-esp32-go/

I've had one of these for a few months, and its pretty awesome to be honest:

https://thingpulse.com/product/espaper-plus-kit-wifi-epaper-...

You can do surprisingly much with today's electronics even on a tight power budget. E.g. Pi Zero W can operate on ~2.5 W. The remaining power can drive a much larger e-Ink screen, or even a small TFT.

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