Modos: The World’s First E-ink Laptop | Hacker News Reader

Modos: The World’s First E-ink Laptop

modos.tech

4 pointsalex-a-soto13 comments

Hey HN,

I’m Alex and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Modos.

Our mission is to help you live a healthy life by creating technology that respects your time, attention, and well-being. To this end, we are building the world’s first e-ink laptop that’s both open-hardware and open-source.

Since early March 2021, we’ve been working on identifying the challenges of building an e-ink laptop, researching possible approaches to these challenges, conversations, and development. We are nearing the completion of our second prototype Lancer.

If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, please feel free to reach out.

Thank you,

Alex

Aren't you the same guy that alleged E Ink was abusing patents on your blog but then backed down when I asked for evidence of it? I can't find your original article. You also had a previous project Eink2020 or something like that? What happened to that?

Yes, I made a mistake in the article, and I corrected it. Thank you.

The people who have worked on the EI2030 community are working on this project. As we worked on the project, we realized the need to start Modos to achieve our goal of building an eink laptop. Happy to talk further.

How come you don't mention your past allegations and EI2030 at all on the site? Seems like a very significant thing to leave out. There's also no list of people involved in Modos on the site.

You have a Spartan FPGA as your display controller? For a laptop? You call it an E-INK laptop but I saw on your Lancer it is for some alternative LCD technology instead?

Any word on pricing ?

I would love a low powered device mainly for writing.

1k is my impulse buy limit

If you can build this for that I'll be your first customer.

We are in the early stages of figuring out the price; price depends on many factors. We are aiming for less than 1k.

> price depends on many factors

Price depends on volume.

There's negligible chance of you realistic hitting less than 1k for a functional EINK laptop unless this thing is yet another kickstarter/indiegogo scam trying to exploit the desperation of those of us with sensitive eyes.

This is a good reminder to only buy hardware retail, let someone else take the gamble of the product never coming out.

You seem to have some expertise in this space, is an e-ink laptop even possible? Possible?

My assumption is someone like Amazon would have done this already.

Subjective. In my opinion, the physics of electrophoretics imposes a minimum latency that no body will be able to surpass unless they change to new yet-to-be-invented materials or create new laws of physics. 700ms for a clean greyscale update in 2006 has remained 660ms in 2022. Sure, there's various tricks degrading to 1-bit dither like A2 with Dasung but it the core apple to apple comparison proves physics remains the unsurmountable bottleneck. Some users can tolerate that kind of latency for some purposes. Document editing is a good example. 700ms is fine for that. Such a "laptop" is possible. But a general purpose laptop? A basic proof, add a usleep(700*1000) to foo.flip() and see how your user interface feels. If you can tolerate it, then such a laptop could be available for you.

Aren't you leaving out partial refreshes here? Several e-ink tablets have achieved near-instant feedback for writing and typing. Full refresh times don't matter near as much for text processing, so I think you are overdramatizing.

Still, general purpose computing is indeed questionable. But why wouldn't it be possible to manufacture and sell such a device at < $1000? 13.3'' displays are at $370 [1], and the remaining specs are inexpensive [2] (given there is no ssd included). Solely depends on ones profit margin, it seems.

By the way, I appreciate your steady fight against malicious patent usage claims of e-ink corp by many users on HN. No idea if you are right, but it is admirable that you rightfully keep insisting on proof as there seems to be none.

[1] https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/13.3inch-... [2] https://github.com/Modos-Labs/Lancer

The term partial refreshes leaves much to be desired. I'd call it unclean refreshes.

Perhaps I'm overdramatizing.

> But why wouldn't it be possible to manufacture and sell such a device at < $1000? 13.3'' displays are at $370 [1], and the remaining specs are inexpensive [2] (given there is no ssd included). Solely depends on ones profit margin, it seems.

Notice what I wrote was different. I wrote "There's negligible chance of you realistic hitting less than 1k for a functional EINK laptop ". "You" being Alex. That's because I saw a Spartan FPGA in there just as a display controller. That alone tells me the claim they'll be able hit 1k for a laptop device is seriously scammy.

Great !

I'd be willing to pay a premium if it has an HDMI input.

I don't know how hard this is though, it might be outright impossible.

This way I could use it as a healthier screen as well.

Yes, I agree. We have talked about adding HDMI input, and we would like to incorporate it so that the laptop can serve different needs and use cases.

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