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E-Paper Wall Paper

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121 pointslxm31 comments

Here's a build log of a recent e-ink project of mine, using ChatGPT and Rust: https://imgur.com/a/NoTr8XX

How much did that run you? That looks awesome and i'd buy one right now if someone made this or made it easy for me to make it

About $550 total. $400+shipping for the panel, $100+shipping for the Halbe frame with low reflection glass and a passepartout cut to size, $50 for the other bits.

There's a 10.3" panel for half the price. With an IKEA frame etc. you can probably do a slightly smaller $250 build.

That’s terrific, quite inspiring!

A couple of questions, if that is okay; How much did all of it run you down in the end? How do you recharge the battery? Did you consider adding a USB-C charge port somewhere? How much does it cost you to use the ChatGPT-API?

(1) See my reply to your sibling re build cost rundown :-)

(2) If you take a close look at the build, the module at the bottom is a little BMS board with a USB-C connector for charging!

That said, I made the battery detachable with glue-on velcro pads and also have a Riden bench PSU with a very convenient battery charging mode. Often I don't bother with a USB receptacle and charging circuit for DIY projects and just go that route.

(3) I currently use the gpt-3.5-turbo model on the OpenAI, which at present costs $0.002 for 1000 tokens. 1000 tokens are about 750 words. I make between 8 and 16 API calls to the OpenAI API for an update, with an in/out total of about 6000-8000 tokens on average (mainly because I am submitting the original article texts). I update the newspaper once a day in the morning. The total monthly cost is very low.

Great job. These projects remain as cool as they are non commercial.

It sucks that eink is still so ridiculously expensive. I recently had to pay around 2k for a 32" eink device. Bonkers pricing.

Woah, that's TV size, I didn't know they made those. What are you using it for, what's it like?

Yep, there are some Chinese manufacturers making them; I occasionally see information popping up on them on e-reader devices news websites. As you can see though, still not cheap.

Here are some of the larger e-ink displays.[1] No prices given. They're being pitched to cities as bus stop displays, because they can be run from a small solar panel. It might make sense for that, because having power run to a bus stop sign probably costs more than an expensive E-ink panel.

I notice that some Alibaba sellers of similar displays copied some of their images from that site.

[1] https://www.smartcity-displays.com/large-format-e-ink-displa...

You still need the bus data sign illuminated at night, and bus stops have plenty of room on top of the shelter for a larger solar panel.

Boston's got some of the solar-powered ones, I've seen them late 2022: https://blog.eink.com/bostons-ink

Looks like they were also using them for transit at one point, but I haven't seen these myself: https://www.mbta.com/projects/solar-powered-e-ink-signs

Can you share the images of the device?

yep, even 13~14in bare e-ink screens are the price of mid-range tablets

I guess the market isn't quite there

It's usually explained as being "the patents are owned by a company squeezing every cent of licensing rights". I wonder when those patents expire

It sucks that u_e = v/E . Bonkers.

The colour is surprising --- the images displayed on them don't look like they're grayscale.

It only has 64kb of flash onboard, so [Aaron] devised a clever compression technique that enabled him to store complex images on the displays.

Note that an EPD itself is a "write only" memory with no minimum clock rate, so images can be streamed directly over the network to it.

The displays can show black, white and red. He picked a good image for that palette. Still, the dithering was surprisingly effective.

Sounds like the early two color process in Hollywood… they got red (for skin tones) and a sort of teal blue green that could sorta do plants and sorta do sky, but wasn’t real convincing at either.

They should have used orange and blue https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OrangeBlueContra...

Dithering is amazing. I built a display to show my calendar:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/making-the-timeframe/

When testing it out, I tried to show a grayscale image, because the display supports four tones, but it came out horrible. Then I displayed a dithered two-tone image (black and white) and it was much, much better:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/making-the-timeframe/dithered.j...

I wonder if there are any arbitrary-palette dithering algorithms that I could try, it would be great to be able to use the other two tones and still dither.

These remind me of that company called nanoleaf, they sold these stackable canvas led squares that really was beautiful but expensive if I remember correctly. But these seem to be a cheaper alternative, cool!

I have two sets of Nanoleaf Canvas (they have more shapes now). The "main node" from the first set of 9 squares stopped working after about 2 years. I bought another set of 9 squares to use the main node from the new one with 8 squares left from the first set and 8 squares from the new one.

Sadly, they didn't fixed issues in years and are selling buggy product which can reset itself few times within 2 minutes (only in certain color modes but reboots take more time than working mode) and leaves (heh) me with just a few options to choose from if I don't want the product to constantly reboot itself and show pale-white color for 30 seconds.

I was considering buying their newer products but decided not to as I don't appreciate company which sells stuff they well know is faulty.

For reference, both older and newer Nanoleaf Canvas are the model NL29-0002SW-9PK and were bought off their official Amazon store.

Interesting how closely your experience mirrors mine. Bought 2 sets of Canvas back when they came out. Panels all still work and one of the "main nodes," but the other node just up and died. I haven't done the autopsy yet.

They still exist. I'd argue Govee has a superior version of that product for less money, but you can still buy the original Nanoleaf.

It's cool but not really "wall paper".

I'm a simple man. I upvote any eInk/ePaper project I see on HN. Love this.

Awesome project, however, expensive.

Conceptually e-paper may have been a misnomer. Considering the cost and scarcity, it really has nothing in common with ubiquitous and cheap paper.

I wonder if E-Paper could be a suitable camouflage in Ukraine to hide from drones? Most of the drone clips I've seen are with visible light but maybe are the drones using other light sources? If not a massive epaper display or even many smaller ones... could be feasible camouflage?

Camouflage works better on things that aren’t moving. And it wouldn’t stop infrared, laser designators, or radar.

The best camouflage from the ground is to fly low and have a color scheme that is difficult to read against the sky. Gray works well.

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