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Comment by kayodelycaon | Hacker News Reader

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kayodelycaon

One more step towards a truly open eInk tablet! :D

Please note:

- Purchase is restricted to people who have signed up to be developers.

- This is a hardware prototype with no drivers or operating system.

- You are expected to install an operating system yourself and write the drivers needed to make the device work.

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"Most of the device’s functionality, including the e-paper display, do not work at this time."

How exactly does it boot.

If you do something really stupid and somehow fry your SD card in your Raspberry Pi, that's fine because you can always pop in another SD card. I wouldn't want to accidentally burn out the internal storage on this tablet and have no way to replace it.

> Currently, the only ways to flash software are from the factory Android installation (UART shell, adb, or fastboot) or by using rkdeveloptool

https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineNote_Development

Procedure for "entering maskrom mode", from the link above, is so cool! Reads like some magic ritual:

> Flip the device around so that the display faces down

> Lay the pen on the right side, with its tip pointing towards the speaker grill, and its magnet pointing towards the upper right corner of the label on the back.

> Turn the device on (...)

The old cylindrical mac pros had a similar trick where the case had a magnet in it and the computer itself had a detector for it. So if you ever wanted to turn it on without the case to see the diagnostic lights, you had to know where to put a magnet to fool the sensor.

This is an exceptionally overpriced way to do it: Dell PCs tend to just have a little push switch that's depressed when the case side panel is on. (For a corporate environment, these are also very helpful for tamper protection, of course.)

The key difference is that apple cares what their computers look like when they're open. Dell doesn't. An ugly switch would ruin the line of the Mac's case and look out of place.

Now, you may disagree with that philosophy, but Apple is wildly successful for it. Personally, I don't like Macs anymore, but I do absolutely respect that attitude.

I think removing the side panel would ruin your Mac's look more than a hidden switch behind the side panel does.

Apple believes that even when the computer is open, it should look good. Thin Steve loved joking that the back and insides of his computers looked better than the front of the competitors.

> One more step towards a truly open eInk tablet! :D

What about Inkplate? No one ever mentions that.

I have an Inkplate but it's really more a programmable display, and not tablet-like hardware/features like this.

Ah thanks, I will check into it more carefully. I've been wanting one and maybe it can suffice without being a full featured tablet.

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