Reasonably priced color e-ink display
waveshare.com
waveshare.com
Sure, it'd look like badly-registered offset printing, but that only matters for small up-close displays, not large far-away displays. (And you could fix the registration with a precisely-cast diffuser layer, convolving each subpixel-cluster.)
If this was for reading rather than imagery, and you wanted to have true blacks, you could also just step one level forward in e-ink technology, and have the colored micro-capsule groups be just dual-tone (the capsule's color plus black), giving you {C+K, Y+K, M+K, K} bitplanes.
Are e-ink display manufacturers just imprecise in the way they deposit the capsules into the panel, making it impossible to address individual capsules? (If so, that seems like something that could be solved pretty easily with modern photolithography processes, e.g. etching onto the backing electrode a grid of "buckets" for individual micro-capsules to fall into.)
If you look at an e-ink display under a microscope you'll see that the "pixels" are more like "shards" of variously-shaped cells.
https://twitter.com/sqfmi/status/1178018736684580865
The "pixels" are made of the actual addressing grid that creates the currents that attract the pigment in the capsules.
This is part of what ends up giving the appearance of a higher-resolution display when rendering text, as you get some softer edges "for free." (And it's what makes the display look 'blurry' for some viewers.)
So, to your question, there's currently no attempt with the technology to precisely place the colors on the display. The capsules are just spread all over, and the grid does the work.
Rods in eyes aren't on a regular grid anyway, why should it matter how the pixels are distributed as long as they cover the plane and are mostly uniform?
So instead, each cell is capable of displaying any color, and they've got a more complicated refresh mechanism that they use to "write" to them.
And the upshot of that is listed in the specifications from the linked page: The refresh time on this display is 15 seconds. Which is far, far away from where it would need to be in order to be a practical option for color e-readers.
- https://www.eink.com/assets/img/technology/GIF_Cup_E.gif
- https://www.eink.com/assets/img/technology/GIF_ACeP_E.gif
Refresh rate was always an issue, but it is gradually improving. For static reading it's not a problem.
If there was a way to mix the inks and have them 100% separate by the grid on demand, it could be possible.
So any projects started since 2008 that were written without Py3 compatibility had known tech debt they were choosing to take on.
My point is this is a very different situation from the Python 2->3 transition.
If you have 12 years' notice to make some changes, I don't consider that technical debt: that's the normal price of maintaining software in a changing world. It's not "debt" that costs "extra interest" to pay back for questionable choices made previously.
Hell, since the writer was omnipotent and omniscient, the code was even built with the ability to perfectly modify itself when the company changed the DB on September 12, 2011 at 3:24 in the morning.
It’s fun to imagine Jesus returning in 30xx AD but this time instead of absolving the world of its accumulated sin he wipes away the accumulated technical debt of 1.5 millennia worth of corporate IT
I’m not sure that current “transparent” oled technology is transparent and thin enough though.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/165724/bye_bye_kindle_netboo...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/04/apple-exploring-hybr...
These are unique advantages to e-ink as far as I’m aware.
Also where did this stationary context come from?
You can easily have a non backlit black and white display, like the one on an f91w or LCD clock.
Of course, you could simply make a matrix of tri-tone capsules, with white, black and colour. Then you have the contrast ratio and the colour space advantages. I don't know why this hasn't been done, I'm not an expert on e-Ink!
The microcapsules are not individually wired up to anything, so I don't think it's feasible to make each color channel independently addressable. Instead, a grid of wires behind the capsules are either positively or negatively charged, in order to attract or repel the charged colored particles in each capsule. There are only 2 charges, but by using different sizes of particles for different colors, you can finagle it so that the color you want ends up on top.
If they could address capsules individually, that would also increase the possible resolution of a black-and-white display; they'd do it if they could. But since the mechanism is about attracting and repelling charged particles, there's probably a pretty hard limit on how much you can increase the resolution before there is interference between neighboring pixels.
Would that still look like paper, though?
OTOH I did see a 30 something inch e-ink development board for sale once and wondered if I could hack one together. It was expensive, but that didn't particularly matter because the company made it clear they wouldn't sell to consumers or hobbyists.
The big thing is not depending on the screen keeping in perfect sync with your typing. I know this causes an issue for me when it's related to talking - an echo off by a hundred or more milliseconds will absolutely throw me off the rails - but it doesn't bother me so much when typing. A mental relic of writing code in terminals connected to distant servers, I'm sure.
But if you have a business address it always allowed to request a sample.
1) The rumors are that some of the display manufacturers have contracts with big device makers to not sell panels direct to consumer. I don't have evidence to verify this, though.
2) There aren't a lot of displays that exist _at all_ outside of the small/eReader/Big Sign categories. So there probably just aren't the production lines out there to push those out.
3) Since refresh rates in even the best cases aren't great, it's unlikely to get a lot of traction in most markets, so I don't think anyone is pursuing it heavily.
4) eInk (the company) seems very uninterested in the hobby market at all. They seem to want a few big contracts, and that's all they're interested in.
I'm probably just muddying the waters at this point.
7FPS is probably not quite high enough, but I've seen 10-13" displays with 15-20FPS, and that would be fine for normal computing.
I'd probably swap my scrollwheel for PageUp/PageDown to make full page refreshes a little more pleasant though.
There was even one company (edit: Pixel Qi) putting solar cells in the displays themselves, so the device recharged while being used in sunlight.
YouTube video comparing Pixel Qi in sunlight with normal backlit LCD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1mD6vhp3U8#t=1m45s (around 01:45)
I don't know why one would want a huge daylight visible console, but it's one of those things where I'm just not creative enough.
Not exactly a command line terminal, but there was an ambient signage project on HN recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22831323
I don't need 30, 60, 120, or 144 Hz refresh rates to work with text. It would probably be impossible to see the difference. What I need is contrast and brightness settings to limit eye fatigue, and that's where e-ink would be great.
Or even simpler -- a mouse cursor is essentially unusable on an e-ink display. Much like an old passive-matrix LCD, you'd need to implement nasty workarounds like cursor trails to restore any semblance of usability.
Works for other types of wms too, just use a main display to browse and the eink to read.
They were founded in 1997, so their earliest patents have probably expired. I wonder when the clones will arrive. Maybe they’ll have a better marketing and sales strategy.
As for the marketing, just don't do any. Let the hobby market find it on their own and then just set a minimum order for anyone that wants to work directly with the company for their small project.
I think getting into the hobby market would amount to a huge long tail market of kickstarter style projects and other small products with potential to blow up.
I really don't see how their current strategy could be that great considering how rare it is to see products out there that are e-ink.
I'm trying to think of a single kickstarter-style project that generated a volume above even 100K units let alone a million. I can't think of any.
BeatBuddy is probably the most successful by unit volume project I can think of, and they're probably under 10,000 units.
So, the evidence is that the hobbyist market is completely useless to manufacturers.
If you want someone to invent something that uses them, you'll have to have them in the hands of people that invent stuff. Maybe you only break even on your small scale sales to hobbyists, but eventually one of those hobbyists will be the one to invent the next big thing.
And, I would argue, for two good reasons.
1) When you think about things like the Homebrew Computer Club or the Tech Model Railroad Club, the point is that the membership were engineers. Yes, they were hobbyists, but they were already professionals in the field. Kickstarters don't seem to attract that engineering crowd.
2) Anybody with actual knowledge of hardware laughs at the amounts that kickstarters raise. Most engineering professionals can personally move the amounts of money that most kickstarters can raise.
The combination of the two is death for the Next Big Thing(tm) coming out of a kickstarter.
As an engineer whose project proposal (with proof of feasibility in the form of working and one-at-a-time manufacturable fully functional prototypes) was rejected by Kickstarter back in 2017, maybe their selection criteria are the reason.
But, yeah, if they do, that's simply going to kill the feedthrough as nobody can predict what's going to become big.
Let's say XYZ software is only available to businesses. As a professional software engineer, if I asked to buy XYZ, it'd get bought. But since I can't use XYZ in my personal life, I've never even heard of it, and as a result when we're deciding on software to buy at the company I have no familiarity with it and it doesn't get bought.
Perhaps somewhere out there there are some 100x hardware developers, but every hardware developer I've met likes what they know, and a lot of what they know from a combination of personal tinkering and university. It's hard to explain how powerful familiarity is with designing hardware. So if you're sitting down and designing something and you need component A or B, and B uses less power and looks cool and all kinds of stuff, but you have experience with A and it works fine, well, you'll go with A. And for good reason! Things have weird quirks and spec sheets lie and all kinds of stuff happens.
So yeah, I think that having some kind of community connection can pay absolutely massive dividends. At the end of the day, if it's only accessible to large corporations, then it's not even accessible to those large corporations - because the engineers at them won't have familiarity with your thing and they'll just pick what they know.
Furthermore, it's not even that hard to sell to hobbyists. You make the spec sheet public, you make some example code public, you mail some units to Digikey and you're done. You wanna go REALLY crazy, you can mail a few free units to some well known tinkerers. It's not like you're personally offering 24 hour phone support to everyone with an Arduino. The investment of a couple of hours to deign to mail Digikey a box is quickly recovered by the first engineer that plays with your widget at home and then suggests it at $bigco.
Would that be legal?
Now then, with the linked screen's 15 second refresh time, this is obviously not the case. But it (naively) seems like a compromise to keep the cost low, since the added tech and software to enable partial refreshes would add to both price and complexity.
I created an LLC a few years ago to route my moonlighting consulting work through.
Even if my need for it dries up eventually, I'd still probably keep it around. Single greatest benefit of having it is ease of access to the commercial and industrial supply chain and slipping through these sorts of "no consumer or hobbyists allowed" sales positions.
But that's still within the "arguably a tablet screen" size range.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/comments/hsn7kx/onyx_usin...
• In monochrome panels, you can get 16 shades, and a full refresh in under a second (with partial refresh much faster, as tight as very few milliseconds for small areas, or commonly 30fps full-screen update if you’re willing to compromise a bit on image quality).
• In colour panels, you don’t seem to get shades or rapid refresh: seven colours means you get a seven colour palette, so you’ll have to use dithering to get any in-between colours; and you don’t get partial updates at all: even the fastest coloured panels take a couple of seconds to update the image, and the more colours you add the slower it is.
If I’m wrong about these and there are colour panels with more interesting colour or partial refresh, I’m interested to hear. I just haven’t seen any, and have done some looking.
The long and the short of it is that colour e-ink displays are only useful for display use, not for individual devices like ebook readers or computer displays.
With fewer rows to update, each row gets a push more often, flipping the grains faster.
They're significantly easier on the eyes and they're a joy to use. I don't particularly care about color. One thing I'm wondering though, is what are the technical challenges behind building such a display?
Ideally, I'd like to be able to use an Android device that renders onto e-ink. I don't particularly care for watching videos and such - most of my time on my phone is spent sending and reading IM's (Signal, text, e-mail) rather than viewing media, so lower refresh rates is not something I really care about.
Where are the shortcomings causing e-ink displays to have very low refresh rate? Does it have to do with modern rendering technology being so well optimized for color displays that they simply are not performant for e-ink?
1) Take a fluid, color it mostly white(ish).
2) Suspend a bunch of tiny black "balls" inside this fluid. The balls need to be charged so they can be attracted to an electric field.
3) Squish this fluid between some glass.
4) Put a grid of electrodes on the back that you can address.
5) Now, using some clever AC patterns, you can address any "pixel" on your grid, and apply a charge there, that will attract or repel the little balls.
6) When you attract the balls, that spot turns black, because you just see the balls above the fluid.
7) When you repel the balls, that spot turns "white" because you just see the fluid, not the balls.
The trick is that moving the balls back and forth (6/7) is a physical process, and requires time. They _have_ to move a physical distance, and if that fluid lets them move too easily then they won't keep their color. The balls will move and they'll just drift back to some middle ground.
Also, if you're not careful with your approach, you can mess with the charge of the balls, and they'll no longer respond to the field the way you want. This is burn-in. (And it's why displays do full-black-to-full-white refreshes from time to time)
So until we can figure out how to move those balls faster in the fluid, we really aren't going to dramatically improve refresh rates with this technology.
Note: "Balls" is a simplification.
If you want a volumetric display, maybe it will work, but the display itself will need to be the same size as the total volume of depth you want to create, e.g. digital objects can not appear outside the screen.
Due to the fact that eInk is a non-backlit technology, I can't imagine creating a glasses-free stereoscopic effect using eInk.
https://onyxboox.com/boox_max3
They're 13.3" displays, work with Android and you can use them as an external HDMI display. However, the refresh rate is still poor, not nearly 20-30Hz. The Technology Connections Youtube channel has made two very interesting videos, showing the many caveats of the device (it's an older model, but I'd guess most of it still applies). The main issues are poor software and slow CPU:
You can buy one now. The money will (probably) be used to improve this technology.
It didn't look that much better (or distinguishable, for the matter) than one of those reflective LCDs (e.g. Pebble's). And reflective "memory" LCDs also have almost negligible -- though not zero -- power consumption. Except for maybe signage products most people don't care about this difference, and LCD is way cheaper and mainstream, so...
It's no surprise that many manufacturers just put an LCD and try to get away by calling it "ePaper". There is a lot of geek appeal here, but I'm not really sure if we really need any new technology for "mainstream".
That is a really neat technique though, I hadn't read up on the details before.
By the way, one thing I don't get is why the pictures have such low saturation but the "demo" view shows really excellent saturation. Are there constraints when mixing colours perhaps?
Edit: This was explained below by sparker72678: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23900165 . I didn't know they worked this way.
I don't miss color syntax highlighting, and it's much more relaxing on the eyes. I could imagine others using it as their main monitor in a joint display setup, code in e-ink, browser in color.
There is however the Hisense A5C phone with Color E-ink Display now on the market and it features a decent refresh rate.
Not affiliated, just a fan.
Also, since the refresh rates are limited it's not like we can build ourselves a nice external large e-ink display for our reading pleasure and for the sake of our eyes.
There's a need gap for 'Affordable E-Ink large external displays'[1], last time we discussed about it here it was pointed out that the likely reason for we not having such displays are due to IP.
[1]https://needgap.com/problems/43-affordable-e-ink-large-exter... [Disclosure: It is my problem validation platform].
The appearance of buildings would no longer necessarily be static.
More generally, I believe that the extreme minimalism, "tranquility" (or blandness) and simplicity of more contemporary styles may some day become unpopular.
So I expect that we will see trends in the opposite direction eventually. More colors. Maybe a changing facade with e-ink. Rather than simple, boxy shapes, more intricate and more organic shapes. Large-scale 3d printing could make the use of such forms more practical.
I also expect to see architecture that is more dynamic in that it will automatically reconfigure itself in response to weather changes or the day/night cycle, winter/summer, etc.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0DVlGZ3_d3Q
I’d love one of these with a full keyboard, wifi and enough of a terminal emulator to ssh somewhere.
And I mean, it works: https://i.imgur.com/FNbKA0b.jpg
Vim certainly makes the latency tolerable.
ok, i clicked the wiki link: www.waveshare.com/wiki/5.65inch_e-Paper_Module_(F)
"There is currently no text in this page. You can search for this page title in other pages, or search the related logs, but you do not have permission to create this page."
so, not really hobbyist friendly
My understanding is that modern printers actually mix those four different inks together on the page to achieve a wide range of colors. That isn't possible with a display where colors have to remain within their own separate (sub)pixels and can't actually mix together.
With a high enough resolution that might not matter, as your eyes would be unable to discern individual subpixels, but this display is only 600×448, and that's with only one subpixel per pixel. (A CMYK display would need 4; maybe slightly less depending on subpixel layout.)
Furthermore, modern sRGB displays can output 255 different brightness values for each subpixel. This display can only output 7 values for each pixel. That further reduces the number of possible colors which would be possible in a CMYK subpixel-based display.
Provided all those issues could be solved though; maybe it would work? There could be other considerations I'm missing. (E.g. Can subtractive color mixing even work with subpixels in the first place?)
Good printers are 600dpi, and 300dpi is passable, but this thing is 600x448 pixels on 5.65inch screen.
I think when pixel count is low, using rgb is more efficient.
I’m not an expert in any of this so this is just guesswork.
But when you do this, you're dragging a _single_ color.
_All_ the colors are in the capsule, but you can only truly pull a single one at a time, a true pigment-like mixing isn't possible. If you pull the Cyan up, you're necessarily losing the Magenta, for example.
If you had a high enough resolution addressable grid, you might be able to put the pixels close enough that you couldn't tell, but you'd still be basically doing sub-pixel color at that point, not truly mixing the various colors at the base level.
Maybe there are other e-ink displays doing something else, but all the ones I've seen are doing some form of this approach.
Here's a fascinating video on how these displays work, and how you can modify the firmware of the driver to get faster refresh rates (with an increased risk of burn-in). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsbiO8EAsGw
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrowetting#Applications
EDIT: 15 SECONDS PER FRAME, not 15fps. Thanks everyone for pointing that out. Still, amazingly cheap ... and almost no standby current after programming.
edit: Fixed to be 4 frames per minute not 4 frames per second.
That's 15 seconds per frame, or 0.067 fps.
That refresh rate is fine if you're using it to show the price of a rack of clothing, or various sensors - but you're not going to get smooth-scrolling text with it. The low-power interface is for those same battery-backed retail signage applications, where you're driving this, the microcontroller, and the wireless receiver with 3.7v from a coin cell.
Glad to see these becoming available for consumers and hackers! They've been hard to come by for years.
More like the ubiquitous readouts in the "2001" Discovery ship.
I am really looking forward to the day when high refresh rate e-ink displays are common. The B&N Nook from about 8 years ago could be modified to successfully play flappy bird at about 10hz, but it was pretty ugly to use, requiring a black/white full clear of the screen to zero out the image every 30 frames or so.
Maybe it's just me, but this seems quite expensive for a price tag. It also seems quite large for a name tag. I get that eink is useful in general for these cases, but this doesn't seem to be the best example.
Anyone know of any e-ink with touch built in? can be black and white.
- Pull power from the room behind the wall. Maybe it's more out of view here.
- Place it next to a door, remove part of the frame, run wires inside the door frame.
- Cable channel exists in many different shapes and sizes, not only the boring box ones.
- Go the opposite route, why hide your cable? Make it stand out. Like those wall lamps with a brightly coloured / patterned cable hanging in loops down the wall. Turn it into wall art.
You can find some pretty wall mounted tablets in the homeautomation and homeassistant reddits :)
[1] https://www.buydisplay.com/5-inch-lcd-screen-tft-module-800x...