Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

Hello! I was very happy to see this project, it is close to my heart. I had a similar dream years ago, an ultra-low power e-paper laptop. (I noticed people mention such a desire on HN every time something e-ink related comes up! There are dozens of us!)

I also looked into transflective / reflective LCDs as an alternative to e-paper. I haven't built anything though, for various reasons (mostly excuses, if I'm honest! Life is hard, I am busy, but I guess that's true for everyone..).

Are there any other similar devices (or projects actively being developed) with a battery life measured in years?

My current understanding is that I would need to study electrical engineering to have the skills to build something like this, is that true? I have been making some slow progress towards that (learned C, studying assembly, brushing up on my math, studying calculus etc).

But a full EE degree does seem like overkill: I looked at the coursework at a university near me, and it has you learning about optics and quantum physics... so it really seems like most of the work is unrelated to the actual goal of building tiny computers.

Is there a way to find or create a curriculum focused specifically on the things you actually want to build? (If not, I expect there will be in a year or two, at the rate AI is developing ;)

Or perhaps I'm looking at it backwards, has this tech progressed to the point where it is possible to just start building without really knowing what you are doing, and learn as you go along?

As someone with an EE undergrad and masters degree, you really don't need it to hack on electronics, especially if you'll be starting with off-the-shelf parts or a microcontroller kit. Understanding the basics of voltage, current, and the ability to use a multimeter and soldering iron are probably all you need to make some interesting things.

Echoing this point, an electronics project book, a breadboard and some simple components are all you need to get really really far in combining electronics like this. You can get 90% of the way there with just Ohm's Law. For laying out circuits you can learn about capacitance and inductance, but again, you can literally learn by doing. As in all technical endeavors, debugging is the real skill.

The rest you learn along the way.

As for the eInk laptop, I have that eDream as well. The hack I wanted was to use an LCD panel across the top for live editing, undo, etc. And then once the line was done, the eink display would wake-up, take the new line of text and write it to the display and then go back to sleep.

A couple nice eink options for the discriminating hacker

https://www.crowdsupply.com/soldered/inkplate-10

https://www.waveshare.com/

Remarkable just came out with a keyboard for their eink device, so that might do the trick for you for now. Its battery life isn't anywhere near what you're asking, unfortunately.

https://remarkable.com/

> an electronics project book, a breadboard and some simple components are all you need to get really really far in combining electronics like this.

Well, don't leave us hanging, do recommend a book to start with

I started with the Forrest Mims [1] Engineer's Mini-Notebooks from Radio Shack. They contain very little prose and lots of circuits you can build on a breadboard.

https://hackaday.com/2017/01/18/forrest-mims-radio-shack-and...

My recommendation for a current book, that is affordable is

"Practical Electronics for Inventors" by Paul Scherz

Yep. Just started doing circuit design as a hobby to supplement a software project of mine and yeah, pretty much this. It's a lot of fun and isn't super complex to get something working.

I think learning what common design practices like bypass caps, knowing when to apply certain formulas and when not (ohm's law / linear/non-linear components), and knowing where to find help when needed, especially for circuit review, was crucial.

Download kicad and watch a few videos and most software devs I know would figure out enough in a short amount of time.

Bonus points if you understand constraint systems because that's pretty much the entirety of CAD.

As someone with an EE degree I would agree with this. I was disappointed to find out that my career was mostly cutting and pasting stuff out of datasheets and using crib spreadsheets written by some revered dead guy who didn't haven any EE degree anyway and worked it out by reading some books.

You don't need an EE degree (and you wouldn't learn many of the skills needed anyway). You can learn most of the things you need from "The Art of Electronics", by Horowitz and Hill. It's a very complete book on the subject, and it does have only very minimal prerequisites.

The team at Modos https://www.modos.tech/blog/get-involved-with-modos is building an open source Eink laptop

You know, I think the US needs to force more hardware specs for components into the internet as a precondition to selling here. I think it would help the following things:

1) China and "the East" have a dominance in hardware. I don't think this is strategically good. I think we need a lot more skills in hardware electronics, especially if we electrify all our transport and have PV everywhere.

2) I think it is good for the environment: more broken crap can be recycled to adhoc devices and other uses, or might (gasp) be repaired.

3) It will help us be more creative with hardware to maintain the innovator's edge.

4) It will help with onshoring production for supply chain security. This is a country-level existential threat right now. Consider that COVID, which by all historical standards is a very very very weak pandemic, caused such disruption and insecurity in our day to day supplies.

5) I just get the sense that software innovation is declining, well, before chatGPT, but it seems we had a solid decade of "what's the next social network" was the height of software innovation. Um, no it's not, that is deck chair reshuffling.

Of course corporations don't like it, so oh well, it'll be dead on arrival.

> I also looked into transflective / reflective LCDs as an alternative to e-paper.

I looked into this a bit a while back as well. I was disappointed in how few options I could find. What seemed like the best option out there for me is the monochrome SHARP Memory Display Breakout that is used in the Playdate handheld console.

I can't find the 4.4" version mentioned in the article though, the biggest I've found if 2.7".

Please see ESPHome for a bridge between little programmable devices that anyone can pick up. Here is a link to their examples, there is also plenty ofbother guides, https://esphome.io/guides/diy.html

Depending where you go most of the EE degree is just an elaborate hazing ritual, and if you could pass it you could probably just teach yourself what you needed to know.

If you haven't already, get "The Art of Electronics" by Horowitz and Hill - that alone will tell you enough to many things.

Electrical Engineering is much more than just microelectronics. You probably just need a few courses in hobby electronics to be able to build something like that. One of the biggest skills in this field is being able to read datasheets :)

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