I made an eInk newspaper
gregraiz.com
gregraiz.com
I didn't get a chance to write it up yet but here's my software https://github.com/elidickinson/newsvision
I skipped the HTML renderer and used the python library to push image data right to the display's frame buffer. Seems simpler if you're doing the hard work of turning it into an image yourself anyway. I also grabbed the full list of newspapers and used imagemagick to annotate each image with the paper name and location. It's a little hacky, but seems to work.
It's admittedly an expensive display, but it really is very well made piece of hardware.
(To be fair the device does HTML rendering by default and the API for pushing images isn’t super obvious)
1. I'm taking untrusted PDFs and running them on my machine. Using something like say puppeteer that PDF renderer runs in a sandbox. Ghostscript, not so much. PDFs can have code in them
2. Using HTML via puppeteer lets me render tons of other things I might want to render than just PDFs. Plenty if beautiful algorithmic art out there that runs in a browser.
I also think it’d be neat to make an alexa skill for it so you could issue voice commands. Maybe have it show the song and artist data for what’s playing on Spotify.
How are you doing this? It looks like you’re pushing it to their cloud service (or your local docker copy, if configured as such)
It should be possible to set up an encrypted directory with something like FUSE (though afaik FUSE doesn't run on the reMarkable), though. https://github.com/evidlo/remarkable_entware lets you install fstools.
Using this mode, I was able to unbrick it but it's a complex process so it's not for the faint of heart. It's still good to know that with enough elbow grease, you can always unbrick a remarkable.
I think it's because the newspaper industry has tunnel vision. You might ask what about newspaper apps on phones? First it isn't an ideal screen size for a newspaper. Second they only show a fraction of the articles. They also keep articles on their scroll for days and days. I don't know about you but I don't chose a digital delivery to get days old stories.
I think the industry needs a well funded disruptor. Living in Michigan I can tell you that without Elon Musk we'd never be moving toward battery powered automobiles. I've dealt with Gannett's customer service and I have come away convinced that they hate their customers.
I thought it had to do more with the patents on a lot of the e-ink technology? I've been waiting for a proper e-ink monitor that wouldn't cost me an arm and a leg for years.
;-)
eInk is just expensive to manufacture.
Personally I think there is just no demand.
You could build a large reflective LCD for a fraction of the price; you would have none of the problems of eInk -- such as the bad refresh rate -- and users have a hard time distinguishing an eInk panel from a reflective-LCD panel anyway (see the Pebble). Even accounting for the energy consumption it would probably be a close call in cost, unless you plan on updating the panel only a couple times per week. The fact that no one of the LCD panel manufacturers are doing this even with leftovers from other production lines just shows how little demand there is, outside of HN-welcome hobbyist projects and other low-power areas such as smartwatches.
But why the obsessive focus on e-ink? This isn't some silly "click a button" software patent. This is a real "invention" that involves complex physics, material science, and expensive specialized manufacturing lines. If anything seems like an "invention" of the sort that the framers of the constitution had in mind, this does.
So I must believe that the mention of "patents" whenever e-ink is mentioned is some sort of coordinated FUD attack by a competitor or someone with some sort of agenda.
I agree with your conclusion that the reason e-ink seems expensive is lack of demand. More demand could drive production efficiencies and scale.
Those are different people, just both using HN
> Really, nobody else can make e-ink? It doesn't seem like this idea is in any way original.
I must be stupid, because the implementation of e-ink certainly seems novel, original, and useful to me! I would never have thought of it, nor did I see it before I saw the first e-ink display:
Here's a description:
Small capsules filled with a clear fluid containing tiny particles, each about as wide as a human hair.
Each electronic paper display is made up of millions of such capsules in a thin film, with the particles inside the capsules of different colors and different electric charges. Electrodes are placed above and below the capsule film. When a positive or negative electric field is applied to an individual electrode, the color particles with the corresponding charge will move either to the top or bottom of a capsule, making the surface of the e-paper display appear a certain colorJust because people had money to implement it, does not mean it should not be available for anyone else. It seems the patents are used to protect investments of privileged people and that's wrong.
What exactly do you mean when you say "make e-ink display"? That's exactly like saying "nobody can make Microsoft operating system without paying fees". E-Ink is a company that makes lots of different types of displays that vary hugely. Do you mean an electrophoretic display or bistable displays? If yes, then you're quite mistaken because there have been and are lots of companies and startups making bistable displays. E-ink is just the most well known one. Others like Clearink have been winning awards at display shows but have not yet been able to scale their tech successfully. If no, then what exactly are you talking about?
> which I find insane as it is not an original idea.
Your point would be strengthened if you had been able to accurately explain what "idea" you're actually talking about.
> Something that anyone researching the field could come up with shouldn't be patentable. Currently the system favours the rich and promotes walled gardens.
Please try to explain yourself better please. I work in the display industry and I've never heard this from industry insiders. Since you think there is a walled garden, tell us, what specific patent (since you mentioned a patent) is blocking you from building your display product? If you try to reply with responses like "all their patents" or "patent thickets" then it will be clear you're not actually walled out of anything.
And every time there's an e-Ink thread here, a chorus of people chime in and say "Damn Patents! If it weren't for patents, and that pesky U.S. Constitution, everyone would have e-Ink!"
Good thing ideas aren't patentable then!
I guess I give up fighting this trope and I get downvoted even when I politely request a citation to backup such a strong claim. I'll join you then. How about: " Yes, all problems are due to patents. It can't possibly be due to low volume and low demand for these types of displays. It has to be patents. Wipe out all patents and et voila , we'll have 10 cent priced 32 inch bistable displays from all the vendors like eink, clearink, and liquavista, Iridigm will all come back to life and the laws of physics and manufacturing economics will bend to the will of HN posters."
> I hate to say it, but the only way we could have brought the price down with current quantities is if we built an inferior product as the price right now is the function of Bill-of-Materials.
Doesn't sound like patents is the problem
And second, while e-ink devices are really great at sequential reading -- page after page of a novel -- they're not that great at browsing lots of articles, picking the ones you're interested in, just because the refresh rate and scrolling is awfully slow.
Most people aren't bothered about reading news on their phone at all. It really is an ideal screen size for accessing bite-sized pieces of news throughout the day when we have short breaks, which honestly is how most people do it these days.
If you want leisurely long-form journalism over breakfast, you're really only looking at the Sunday paper, or certain weekly magazines. And so you can splurge to get those on actual paper, or else curl up with your iPad or Kindle.
Honestly the lets have a digital newspaper that imitates the form of a paper newspaper is going back to how people were thinking in the late 90s (fishwrap I think? out of MIT). I honestly don't even reach for my tablet all that much because I'm already on my phone or a laptop.
I do like e-ink for flowing text reading and I have a Kindle but I don't have any interest in a different tablet that's just for newspapers absent the newer more dynamic features.
That's a project I haven't heard mentioned in a long while! We're both getting old though... Fishwrap is from the early 90s... got started in 1993 and the main paper on it was published in 1995.
The newspaper business model is broken. At the rate of decline we will be left with at most a half dozen newspapers in this country. There are many places I can get national news, but only one or two places that I can get local news.
If you eliminate the cost of printing and distribution you can charge less enabling more subscribers and make a profit all without any advertising. Add in a small amount of ads and you can charge less enabling even more subscribers.
Even more important those ads can be targeted. Why should an East side business pay for distribution of their ad to an entire metro area?
But lots of good reporters cost money. Add in the cost of giving away digital devices and it's not a business that can be bootstrapped.
You'd think there would be e-ink devices aimed at mangas nowadays. But the software was adapted to phone usage, that's how you get webtoons and artists playing with the possibilities given by scrolling.
I subscribe to two digital newspapers. I'd subscribe to a lot more, if they were bundled into aggregators (that didn't push worthless sports pages on customers, like cable systems do).
When Apple came out with their AppleNews+, I thought that was it, but then I saw that they don't actually have much that I want.
Both streamers and news organizations need to get their shit together, and bundle. I don't see that happening, any time soon, so the options are still dealing with a Balkanized media scene.
(And that's around what the basic cable TV bundle cost so it's hardly out of line.)
The problem with cable, was that horrible "forced" bundling.
Lose that, and it's worth the money.
The issue with newspapers/magazines is that there are so many of them and there may be only an article or 2 a month I'm really interested in.
There simply aren't any anywhere near that cheap, especially not that big. Besides, everyone in the market for newspapers already has a smartphone or tablet, and those are better at displaying ads, video, etc. The breadth of articles shown is probably of low concern to the newspaper, or they would have fixed it.
I don't know about that. Most people who wants to read the news will often opt for a tablet like the iPad because not only they can read on it, they can also watch videos, send messages, etc.
It's all about maximizing the use of their money with a device that can do as much as possible. I do have an eReader, but compared to tablet owners it's a small market.
As others mentioned, i think the news-tablet is very "take a newspaper and add internet" view when we everyone already has internet connected devices. It almost seems even more tunnel visioned.
The price needs to come down to make this useful.
It's $250 a year for a daily paper subscription to the NYT. I could get it for ten years for the cost of this tech.
Edit: since they’re the same company, can the Joan software be run on the Visionect hardware?
My initial thought was to turn this into a product but the cost of eInk at this size would need to drop to the $500-800 range to make it reasonably viable.
However, maybe he was able to buy it on his company or something.. Part of office decoration expenses? If you're a software integration business I could imagine that would impress potential clients.
I just mean it's exceptionally bad price/performance for a display.
$600 for the 32" version. $1,900 for the 65".
That said... I did feel a bit price gouged. There's not enough of a market to drive the price down. It's not really a consumer product and the company reached out and was somewhat surprised that I bought one.
You answered your own question — and I think like that idea a lot.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/ewfzup/t...
I am not sure this is the future I wanted.
also, how many years until this no longer retrieves security updates, gets pwned, and displays goatse at random intervals?
AKA, is this a $2,500 product because it's a niche with comparatively low demand, or would it still cost $2,500 to produce even at much larger volumes?
Because it is niche and hand made. You can probably buy the fpl material for dollars per square inch but when you don't have a high volume fully automated factory you'll have yield losses when you laminate with TFT and all the various layers. If everything is fully automated, then yields go from like 10% success to 90% success and prices fall correspondingly. I suspect the unsurmountable problem is more likely to be that large eink displays will never be able to beat large lcd displays so they'll never get to high volume.
The e-Ink people have got to get their costs down.
I work in the display industry. No vendor can get their cost down unless they're able to get their volumes up to millions of units per quarter. It's a power scaling law. I doubt E-Ink even manages to sell 10,000 32 inch displays per quarter and if I'm not mistaken these backplanes and laminate material are kerfed by hand! Notice that small sized displays on the other hand are much cheaper. As long as there's nobody willing to pony up an order for a million 32 inch displays, the status quo will likely remain the same.
On the other hand, LCD could be used to create an opacity-changing window, but LCD panels block a lot of light even when they're fully "transparent," which is why they consume so much power (their backlights have to be very bright).
I desperately want an eInk display attached to my computer.
I have amblyopia, and my vision can only be corrected to ~20/50. I develop significant eye strain using normal computer monitors and eInk is much easier on my eyes.
The only monitor-sized eInk display I’m aware of for normal consumers is the 13.3” Onyx Boox Max at nearly $1000.
Does anyone know of a cheaper product out there that would meet my needs?
Pro: As you get a root shell by default, it's nicely hackable and costs a lot less than the Onyx Boox Max.
Con: it's only 10.3".
That said, if I buy one in the 10” range, it seems that Onyx hasn’t released modifications to GPL code so Remarkable might be a more ethical choice.
- Review of Dasung's current generation 13.3" e-ink monitor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeC3LIFTaho
- Preview video of their upcoming 25.3" e-ink monitor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9qrURPAtnY
If low cost is a priority, previous generations of Dasung's e-ink displays occasionally show up on eBay.
its €1500 for the 13.3" version, so …
https://www.ebay.de/itm/Dasung-e-ink-Monitor-HD-FT/133442474...
https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/epaper-1/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal_d...
WaveShare, come on, I'm looking at you.
Are there any challenges that you ran into while building your project
with a Pi Zero W with no issues other than occasional hangups of the signalling but that was solved with a software watchdog.
Here are some pics of my setup. I had to de-solder the Waveshare header and solder on a 90 degree header to get this to fit in the frame in a low profile. (Ugh I wish things were sold without headers soldered)
As far as getting hot really fast, the first thing I can think of is if you accidentally plugged in the GPIO rotated 180 degrees -- even briefly -- you might have fried one or both boards.
Second thing I can think of, although it's more likely to just damage the e-Ink rather than make things become hot -- is e-Ink displays don't like to be hot-plugged/unplugged -- you should have all the connections plugged in before switching the system on.
I'm working on a more "user-friendly" version :)
Just note that it takes a couple seconds to refresh so don't expect too much in the way of animations.
Your project sounds like the perfect piece of technology to add to an installation like this (or to essentially create a new version of it).
[1] https://www.berkeleyside.com/2020/08/07/stop-the-presses-the...
It was so much better than reading on the PC. And it looked a lot like a traditional newspaper. No banner ads and pointless links. Just the story with relevant photos in B/W.
Then I stopped reading news. Still have fond memories of reading the news on eInk, though.
Do you manually add the pages or can it auto scrape?
Calibre has a bunch of "recipes" for some popular news sites. I know I added some of my own. It was not particularly hard, but of course, it breaks when the source makes changes to their site.
You specify the recipes you want and it downloads them periodically.
This link[3] has examples of how it would look on an ereader (it's quite old so it may look different now):
[1] https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/news.html
[2] https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/get-news-updates-kindle-calibr...
[3] https://michaeltalbotuk.wordpress.com/2013/03/23/how-to-use-...
It was previously discussed at length - I actually assumed someone had rediscovered it and posted it here again. Interesting that TFM doesn’t cite the very relevant prior art.
> Why did I build this? I saw something similar online a few years ago and I couldn’t find it for sale so I decided to built it myself.
It is lazy that he should have done some searching make a more concrete cite than just mention that he remembers seeing it. But at least he mentions he was influenced by prior art.
I always regarded e-ink as a soon-to-be (or already) obsolete technology and while that might still be true, I absolutely love it for reading and writing. There is currently nothing better.
I am shot at drawing, so not sure. I only draw up diagrams and things like that.
Compare this to the Remarkable who probably does not violate the GPL but whose software platform does not allow me to simply add more functionality.
Good example of “practically open” to “technically in the GNU sense ... bla bla bla”.
The way it looks remarkable wants to introduce a paid cloud service. Also ironically, they are very closed down in their communication.
This is such a bummer to me — I’m not going to toss my 6” Onyx but I probably won’t buy one of their other products now.
https://static01.nyt.com/images/<year>/<month>/<day>/nytfrontpage/scan.pdf
It got old pretty quickly.
What I found was that the New York Times has great articles that get posted here on HN.
However with the front page with subjects I didn't really care about, I noticed a definite bias. I don't really care about subjects related to trump or biden, but their stories were pretty overtly subjective. I learned a bit about media bias that I wouldn't have picked up reading just tech articles (being so close to the subject).
now I email myself wikipedia current events:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Portal:Current_ev...
Same (except the email part). Its also useful to check the page history for each day too since it can often be a political battleground.
Nice project, but reading a paper from the wall doesn't seem very comfortable.
PS: This screen is ridiculously expensive but you can get pretty nice 12" ones for 200 bucks from waveshare. Even with a 3-color option (black/white/red). Someone also did this with a 7" full colour one recently. Which looked amazing, if you have very good eyes :P Those full colour ones cost only 70 bucks by the way, though getting one is a problem in itself.
Probably resolvable with an algorithm, but I gave up and finished the project. I would get the largest display that offers 4-but grayscale from Waveshare and go with it.
Wow! It's not even twice as power efficient as an LCD! I would have thought it would be much more power efficient than that.
The manufacture's web page makes the same claim: https://www.visionect.com/product/place-and-play-32/
How does it run for months on a battery if it's only 99% more efficient than an LCD panel?
javascript: link=today=new Date();dd=today.getDate();mm=today.getMonth()+1;window.location="https://static01.nyt.com/images/"+today.getFullYear()+'/'+((mm<10)?'0'+mm:mm)+'/'+((dd<10)?'0'+dd:dd)+"/nytfrontpage/scan.pdf";Other opportunities could be displaying the days RSS feeds or HN posts.
You can get 3 color real e paper displays but thats really pushing the tech and it takes ages to refresh.
Re the blog page, I would have liked larger photos including close-ups; it looks great in the video but with a cut every few seconds it's hard to really study the quality.
Cost about $200 all in. Guests are frequently confused why I’ve printed out today’s New York Times.
One downside is the aspect ratio not aligning so the newspaper must be cropped. I’ve chosen to show the top 60% or so of the paper.
Another is that the display I chose is 1-but and dithering uses up quite a bit of the useful resolution. If I were starting over again I’d get a display with 4-but grayscale.
Nevertheless, there has been a recent decrease in price of this SDK hardware. I believe it’s been driven by eInk having created a modular substrate (all the stuff in a display, minus the panel) allowing cheaper iteration on their panel technology. So people can buy the SDK substrate component once; and then buy a new SDK panel component each time eInk reformulates it. Lower manufacturing costs + cheaper logistics for eInk Corp. = cheaper costs for everyone else, even when buying the whole kit together.
(Sort of the same reason that essentially the same cube-shelf design is cheaper from IKEA — IKEA just packs wood tightly into a flat box, and then piles those flat boxes up in a shipping container; and when you buy it and get it delivered, it’s still flat right up until it’s in your house. Other manufacturers, meanwhile, assemble the thing at some point — whether at the factory or at the story — and then ship it at least once in assembled form, where it’s taking up a huge amount of space in the container / on the truck.)
If they would let me, I would actually be perfectly happy to go to the IKEA, pick the boxes myself, and even load them into their truck myself, if that would result in the items then being driven to my house. I have to imagine that IKEA would be pretty okay with that arrangement as well. I wonder why they don’t offer that “service”...
Although I thought they'd deliver almost everything by now too if you want. but haven't checked in a long time.
SO basically you have two options: either use their online story (the most convenient option) or use public transport to go there and a taxi (of adequate size) to get back home. I usually use the former option after having visited the store first to actually try the products I intend to buy. I don't treat their stores as stores but as showrooms.
Edit: there seem to be smaller, hackable displays around as surplus, but still, nothing as big: https://hackaday.com/2020/11/27/repurposing-large-electronic...
1. Don't have $2300 to spend on a hobby
2. Can live with very slow refresh-rates
https://louwrentius.com/a-1248-inch-1304x984-three-color-e-p...
from which foldable displays https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhSR_6-Y5Kg
> €2,300.00
Uhm
Disclaimer: I work for the company that develops the Joan product and the e-ink display, mentioned in the article.
Its old kindle screens reverse engineered and stuck on a dev board containing an esp wifi chip.