Wyldcard e-ink trading card Developer Kit | Hacker News Reader

Wyldcard e-ink trading card Developer Kit

crowdsupply.com

15 pointsjonahss9 comments

After the initial excitement from my Show HN post, Crowd Supply, an open source hardware crowdfunding site reached out about launching my proposed dev kit on their site!

After five months of putting everything in order for the campaign, I'm launching! Happy for the chance to get Wyldcard into the hands of more people.

Congrats on the campaign Jonah!

One thing I’m confused about—it says here that $540 of $1 raised.

Is the campaign starting, or over?

It's starting now and will go for 5 weeks. The raising threshold is $1 because even with one order I'll still deliver units.

The more orders in this campaign, the more units Crowd Supply will order to keep on stock, so there's potentially 50% matching on each sale in this campaign.

I'm not sure if I get it.

How do you use them?

And why is the eink display so slow?

Ah, you can use them like playing cards, like Magic the Gathering or something similar, but the cards can change when placed on a base. This unlocks game mechanics which aren't possible with only cardboard.

The display is slow because I'm doing a full refresh to prevent shadowing.

If you're used to really quickly animated "e-ink" screens like those on the Pebble watches and Playdate, those are actually memory-in-pixel LCDs. While memory-in-pixel is very low power, it still requires some power at all times, whereas these true e-paper screens hold their image without any power at all.

Also, they're the cheapest displays I could get.

Mmhh but you only get 3 cards right?

Oh, you can buy as many cards as you want. Figuring out how to make a good game without too many cards is definitely a constraint. At $15-20 a card, a 60 card deck is pretty pricey.

Could these be used to play real life Sabacc?

It's possible!

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