E-Ink Typewriter
github.com
github.com
The Termux Linux terminal and environment (https://termux.com/) is installable via F-Droid. Among the terminal schemes is an e-ink mode of dark-on-light. Font size is scalable.
Through Termux you have your choice of terminal-mode editors, including vim, emacs, nano, pico, and numerous others.
The handwriten notes feature is also quite good. Text-recognition is a bit iffy but does work.
My main reservation with this setup is that Android's memory management is fatally flawed and processes can be terminated at any time without warning. Terminal sessions really ought to be exemptable from that, but AFAIK they are not. (Please correct me if I'm wrong on this.)
Still, it's a quite good environment with nearly 1,500 packages available using the APT package tool.
Smaller current BOOX devices start at about US$250, used could likely be less than this.
Any Android or LineageOS -capable device should be able to function likewise. There are a few Linux-based devices also on the market (and yes, Kobo is one), including the reMarkable tablet (my major gripe: 16 GB storage is simply stupidly small, this supports a cabled keyboard but not AFAIU Bluetooth), and devices from Pine (in process) and possibly Purism.
A longer review of the Onyx BOOX here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27521248
http://bbs.onyx-international.com/t/please-provide-source-co...
https://www.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/hsyigm/on...
I was considering iPad but would be happy not to get another LED a screen
There's something oddly hostile about e-ink device companies.
I'm curious what that means. Is it a USB-C certified port? If it is certified and has USB host or USB-OTG on the logos, then it better work otherwise they'd fail compliance testing. If on the other hand it is just a USB-C connector for charging and for client mode, then that's normal. Most low end devices don't have a USB host controller and therefore can only be a USB client (like a thumbdrive) and thus can't connect to another USB client like a USB keyboard.
> There's something oddly hostile about e-ink device companies.
What are "e-ink device companies"? You mean like Amazon? Are they hostile?
Not a GP but I have been doing some research on which ereader / note taker to buy lately and although I wouldn’t call it hostile, there is definitely a pattern.
Most eink devices run some modified walled-of modifications of Android.
Most eink devices don’t support USB keyboards (for example, just something I am interested in), and even if they unofficially do, the companies would flat out deny it for some reason (Boox).
Seems like every device has it’s own perspective on how to export / import documents and content
That's not that surprising is it? Doesn't regular Android have a lot of stuff that would break eink displays since they can't update like LCD?
> Most eink devices don’t support USB keyboards (for example, just something I am interested in), and even if they unofficially do, the companies would flat out deny it for some reason (Boox).
Sounds nasty. Any link to further details about what you're saying? Is it just a simple missing USB host capability or are they actively preventing people from using USB host somehow in software?
I emailed Boox support if Boox Nova Air that just came out supports USB keyboard and got a one-liner response that their products to not support getting connected to USB keyboards.
I think the sibling commenter that mentions that they may just want to get rid of support requests is close to truth. I think Remarkable did actually make some design decisions that don't allow to just use USB keyboard (you actually need some aftermarket cable if you want to hack it together). No idea why (once you get the cable the keyboard apparently works). Maybe these companies just really believe in the screen + pen paradigm.
Perhaps they don't want to deal with support calls for “my keyboard isn't working” or “the keyboard mapping is odd for [insert HCI device here]” or similar, and have decided that simply saying “we don't support USB keyboards” is not sufficient to ward that off.
But of course, Remarkable don't actually state that the port is certified, and so it turns out that it doesn't behave at all in the way a normal person might expect.
File transfer is implemented, not via any usual method, but by having the device act as a network adapter, and having a web interface accessible at a fixed IP address, behind a setting that seems to reset itself to Off at various times.
While the port would support OTG, Remarkable has added a kernel module that, amongst other things, breaks the detection and switching needed for that to work automatically. You can configure it manually, in which case the port won't provide power, though a keyboard with a Y-adapter will work.
However, next to the USB-C port, there isa a set of five exposed contacts that appears designed for a magnetic attachment, and Remarkable notes that it's there to support potential future accessories. People investigating them have found that it's a USB interface. It supports OTG, will provide power, and can have a keyboard attached.
On the Remarkable 1, which doesn't have the accessory connection, and thus doesn't have the potential for future products, keyboards can apparently just be attached to the USB port.
>What are "e-ink device companies"?
Remarkable / Onyx / etc: companies that are built around e-ink devices.
Remarkable is open source isn't it? The CEO posts regularly on HN. If that were true, wouldn't you just go in and disable the insmod/modprobe of that module?
Kobo's probably among the better options. It's straight-up Linux, and has e-Book functionality.
Any Android-based e-Book reader / e-ink tablet will also be able to run a bookreader. From my BOOX experience, Onyx's native bookreader (Neoreader) has some advantages in addressing the display as compared with several alternatives I've also installed (Pocketbook, FBReader, Koboreader). OTOH, Neoreader also misses some functionality, so it's a bit of a toss-up.
Pine are coming out with a tablet, it's not officially released yet, though there are some developer / reviewer units that are getting shipped. Its specs look pretty good (many tablets are shortchanged on storage especially).
reMarkable is another native-Linux device. It can take a keyboard and software is installable (also via APT AFAIU). Lars Wirzenius of Linux fame has a good review.
There are several e-book reader / e-ink subreddits which are the best general forums for more information that I'm aware of.
Boox air does this.
This is in addition to their constant connections to their cloud in California, which also happen if you never sign up for any services.
tcpdump doesn't lie.
It's unbelievable, Would we allow this behavior on desktop OS? Mobile operating systems seems to have taken the worst features from typical computer and embedded systems. But who dare question the Duopoly.
I just had rant about this the other day with reg Google Clock not functioning and people loosing jobs because of it[1].
That... is actually a feature of the Linux Kernel. How else would you handle the exhaustion of physical + swap memory or file descriptors, etc.?
On Android, the reaper is actually the JVM, so far as I understand.
I use a 6" Nook but they have an 8" version that is just as easy to set up additional apps on.
Some observations:
The link to the developer homepage in the iOS app store points to msol.io (which appears to be broken/recently registered).
The app is lacking a privacy policy.
One thing I've been thinking about is having a computer hooked up to a rudimentary word processor app on my kindle. The kindle's display doesn't bother me after I'm done working on screens. It feels different enough that it doesn't interrupt my reading, so I've posited that I would be okay writing on one.
I'm excited to see technology like this come out, and I'm excited to see how this little industry grows.
It's also more difficult to get distracted while using a real terminal, because of its inherent limitations as a textual output device.
I have recently bought a Onyx BOOX Nova which I plan to use via a bluetooth keyboard when it arrives. I had the exact same thought regarding e-ink displays since I read a lot using a kindle after work.
You just need an Android tablet with EPD display and a decent word processor.
If you do not want full formatting - so, you are contented with typewriter like rendering -, there must be abundance of software application. If you want proper typographical paragraph formatting, with e.g. full text justification and spacing etc., there are a few usable applications. (As written in anther post, in the end, to have an application with all the features I wanted, I wrote it directly.)
The basic models like the classic iMac Themed 3000 were the best models for this but the Neo gets you a better screen and keyboard.
The LCDs simply do not lend themselves to the same amazing outdoor visibility as modern e-ink displays.
The only way to get your words off is to connect the device over USB to a receiving computer and "send" the text one letter at a time. To be fair it's fairly cool to see the AlphaSmart emulate itself as a keyboard device to Windows and shoot text over faster than any human could ever type, but it's still incredibly slow, can take minutes at a time to transfer single documents.
I own an AlphaSmart Dana - one of the last devices they ever made - and it suffers from many of these issues far worse. It ran a slightly customized version of PalmOS, so it slurped up batteries like nothing, still had non-persistent internal storage, did include an SD card slot but its own writing software saved files in a proprietary format you couldn't open on any computer, so you still had to use the USB keyboard method...
The AlphaSmart devices were made to teach little kids how to type, and not much more. And that is very clear.
Yes, the transfer speeds are slow. On the other hand you can pull up any program that accepts keyboard input on your computer, plug it in, and hit send. You are not messing around with files are proprietary software to transfer those files.
It also takes a lot more than the batteries to die to lose your data. Like many older devices, it has a backup battery to maintain the contents of memory. Both the main batteries and the backup batteries have to be dead to lose data, which is tricky to do since the device will only run from the main batteries.
That said, the editor is very primitive and it is awkward to navigate by word and line alone while editing documents.
USB mass storage would have been a good idea then, and today either MTP or mass storage are much better options.
On top of that, USB Mass Storage support was first built into Mac OS 9 and Windows 2000. The former was about 3 months prior to the AlphaSmart 3000 release and the latter was around the time of AlphaSmart 3000 release.
In other words, short of providing their own driver or software to transfer data, the only means transferring data was by pushing it through a keyboard interface. This may have been acceptable, but undesirable, for home users. Keep in mind, it would have traded ease of use for speed. It would have been less desirable in the education market since it would have meant managing additional software on classroom computers while being more difficult to use.
On top of that, there may have been technical reasons. It looks like it is using a PDIUSBD11D USB controller, connected to a DragonBall EZ microcontroller via an I2C bus. Perhaps someone with more knowledge in this domain can comment on that aspect.
Lately I've been dreaming of building a credit-card sized computer (thickness included) using a e-ink display and ultrathin battery. I haven't found a good purpose for it though.
Speaking of E-Ink, if you remember the "Thinkpad X230 with “e-Ink” display at 30fps": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26860609, I'm selling two of them: https://www.ebay.com/itm/255123140172
If you're taken aback by the steep price tag: from my understanding that's a combination of small volume and the patent situation with e-ink which has been holding the technology back. Seriously, I'm very frustrated with that; essentially these things haven't gotten all that much better (in general, not talking about volume customers like amazon) than the first time I read about them in what, 2005?
I spend hours per day in front of an Onyx Max2 (13.3'' E-Ink + Android) landscape on a full sized BT keyboard with a long slot to accommodate big tablets, and I use a full fledged word processor.
The catch is, I was dissatisfied with all word processors available for Android, so I wrote mine (and I get rich text in full book-like formatting with optimized use of the screen).
Can you please share the name or link?
BTW: battery life is never a problem. The rare events in which I find myself with the red light blinking, I just hook up a portable power bank.
Unfortunately I can't recommend boox anymore, a tiny crack appeared on my note air pretty much where my thumb goes when holding it and spread across the entire display; warranty was useless of course.
> trying to recreate a more perfect Apple Newton with the external keyboard option
I wasn't alive when that was produced, does that mean I am trying to recreate something I don't know about?
I think I get it though, it sounds like it was a product you liked. Excuse the above sarcasm, i just get frustrated that this whole 'repurposing black box tech' is a even thing and I wish we lived in the modular open source and anticapitalist/socialist world of tomorrow, today.
See for instance this post by Nick Temple: https://nicktemple.com/blog/remarkable-keyboard/
I am not sure in which sense you meant that, but my "E-Ink typewriter" (Onyx + BT Keyboard) has never been online.
I'm glad we have better options nowadays.
Good fitness machines though, because you better have strong fingers to type all day long with these devices.
You can see the 8bit guy demo one here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNs-QIMHCJA
I got a Pomera DM30 instead, which just appears as a USB drive mirroring the device's filesystem. It's a Japanese keyboard layout, but the English support is fine, and overall I love it.
I could not bare needing to go through Freewrite's cloud.
Which document formats does it save to?
I'm not aware of any directly comparable non-DIY devices. There are a few other "electronic typewriter" devices that usually come up in these discussions, like the Alphasmart range and the Freewrite, but the DM30 checks more of my boxes.
> And is it actually that small that you can put it in your pocket?
I (a man who wears men's clothes with generally usable pockets) can fit it in a pocket, but not very comfortably. It has a footprint similar to a basic e-reader, but it's thicker, I'd guess an inch and change.
> Which document formats does it save to?
It just saves to plain text, which is perfect for me since I write in Markdown. The editor uses a (sort of ugly) monospace font and has some simple but useful navigation commands.
I just hope the screen is not tooo small :)
But there is just no way on this earth I could ever justify paying $600 USD for what amounts to an e-ink display strapped to a Cherry MX keyboard.