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Comment by velcrovan | Hacker News Reader

Looks nice, but why is there nothing there but a bunch of pictures and a "book a demo" form? Who is the intended audience here?

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Looks like B2B - "Get in touch" or "book a demo" usually means you will be connected with a sales representative.

It also means it's expensive. Not "corporate expensive", but "average-jane expensive".

pre-empting the standard HN response: if you don't like this, they don't want your business. your getting upset means their strategy is working. they want price-insensitive and enterprise customers only, likely because they don't have the support staff or internal work flows to deal with individuals or smaller cash-strapped businesses.

Or... it's simply not feasible to declare pricing up front because it's going to involve some negotiation -- not just around price but support and terms. I think you're hinting at that, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's stupid-money expensive.

In general we've all been spoiled by open source. Someone likely put a lot of work into this. If I were building a device like this, I'd hate to have to hire staff to build this for me, and while it could be "fun" to build, money/time would likely to be better spent elsewhere.

All of that is totally fine for them as a strategy. But it means the HN post here is nothing more than sales promo, which is against the submission guidelines. There’s zero information here.

I can't speak to whether it violates submit guidelines, I think it's interesting that a library like this exists, and I wouldn't agree there's "zero" information.

There's often threads on here bemoaning the lack of adoption of E-Ink screens. So clearly the community here has an interest in it.

Sometimes an "existence proof" works to kick off new projects inspired by the thing being shown off.

The core idea here would seem to be a UI library optimized for e-ink, that uses TypeScript to do the actual UI:s but then relies on a Rust runtime for the actual on-target execution, or something like that. I didn't click on the page, so perhaps I got the details wrong.

Plot twist: in the actual fact their prices may be affordable and/or you can haggle with them, but they put on the glamor to appeal to maybe a few fat businesses that will pony up the cash no questions asked.

You lost me at haggling.

You do run into this sometimes. Flip dot displays can be pretty pricey, new or used, big and small, but after some chatting with the sales team I found out that they'd be happy to sell me a small refurbished panel (not listed in the pricing info they sent me) for a decent discount off what a brand new one would cost to play around with.

Oh, I love that ratteling clicking sound of flip dot displays.

100% same, I thought it'd be interesting to see how many distinct sounds I can get by flipping dots. Flipping a whole row at once has a nice sharp snare-like sound, just one dot is a gentle hi hat tap, I might be reaching on this one but a fast sequential flip isn't too far off from a kick, maybe I could get some generative 7x7 shifting patterns going synced up with interactively made rhythms.

If that’s true, they’ve muddied their marketing.

They specifically mention the hardware being low-cost (ESP32s are ~$6USD)

So they market to producers of e-readers/tablets, I guess.

And if you're a startup looking to ship 10k units in your first Kickstarter round, this library will probably be low-cost compared to your other expenses. But I have no illusions that I'll be able to afford it for a one-off hobby project.

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