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Comment by imiric | Hacker News Reader

I'd really like to have a large e-ink display on my wall showing various dashboards, but I can't justify the exorbitant cost. It would be really elegant to have a low powered programmable setup with an Arduino and a battery, but I'm tempted to just buy a large LCD display and connect it to mains instead.

It's a shame that this technology is kept artifically out of reach to hobbyists.

I've seen the Waveshare displays, but they're too small and limited in features (monochrome or few colors, very high refresh rate, etc.).

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It’s true. Large eink displays get expensive really fast.

I went with a 7.5 inch display for the eink calendar / smart display that I am selling.

I am definitely feeling the limitations, but there is still a lot you can do at that size.

Have a look: https://shop.invisible-computers.com/products/invisible-cale...

And maybe once the business grows, I’ll have the volumes needed to get better prices on the bigger displays.

I’ve looked at your product multiple times and every time I think I wanna buy one. Then I go to the webpage and I see that it only works with Google which is not what I use so then I get sad and leave.

I’d buy one in a heartbeat if there was support for iCalendar or other common/open standards.

I have started working on more calendar integrations now.

If you write me a short mail at info@invisible-computers.com and tell me what integration you need, I will make sure to let you know once it is out.

In the meantime, there are often ways to sync other calendars (also iCalendar) with google calendar. It’s a bit of a detour but it might just work.

For reference, here is a clunky way to sync Outlook calendar events with Google Calendar, using Microsoft Power Automate (which comes free with many Business accounts): https://jacobfilipp.com/sync-outlook-calendar-to-google-cale...

CalDAV is where the money is

You think so? More important than outlook?

If you get CalDAV working, you will support a ton of non-gmail/outlook providers for 'free' including those that are self-hosted. For e.g. runbox, mailbox.org, mailo, etc. all provide caldav to their users - some of these also support exchange but in my 'research', caldav was universal.

Yes please! CalDAV may be an overkill, iCal (which is a "read-only" protocol) would be fine for this device.

I've started working on it yesterday :)

How much of an effort is it to get this working with webcals? I love the idea but don't use google at all...

Hi, I’m about to find out, since I am working on adding support for it :D

If you want I can let you know once it’s done if you send me a short email to info@invisible-computers.com

Looks good. I made one using a waveshare screen and a raspberry pi zero. It cost almost the same as your retail price, but it didnt look this good.

Cool! What are you displaying on it? I am always adding for new use cases to add as apps to my device.

I was displaying a list of tasks from a Todo App via API, clock and calendar, and times in different cities where my company had offices.

Showing a clock ended up being bad for the display as it quickly degenerated. You calendar view is great.

Which todo app? Todoist?

Yes - Todoist! The screen was a waveshare which sadly degraded sooner than I had hoped.

Have you considered using multiple of the current displays together in a single product, presenting them as a single view to the user? Does that help with the pricing?

I think that's something the display OEM would need to do. Once I get the displays, they already have bezels. That won't look good as a 2x2 grid.

Do you sell anything bigger? I only saw the 7.5, I’d be way more interested in something like 24.

I just don’t have the volume right now to get good prices from manufacturers on any bigger displays.

I’m looking into 10 inch displays right now, but they are already significantly more expensive.

At some point it just drives the price of the end product up too much.

The largest devices I'm aware of are E-ink displays. Onyx produces the Onyx BOOX Mira Pro, 25.3" diagonal, based on the E Ink Carta, 25,3", resolution of 3200x1800 dots, 145 ppi, 16 shades of grey.

<https://onyxboox.com/boox_mirapro>

Note that the pixel density is markedly lower than other e-ink devices. For smaller devices, e.g., the Poke 5, DPI is more than double at 300 dpi (comparable to a laser printer): 6", E Ink Carta Plus, 16 shades of grey, 1072 × 1448 dots, pixel density - 300 ppi

<https://onyxboox.com/boox_poke5>

Granted: with increased viewing distance, resolution can fall somewhat, but given that areal density falls as the, well, square, this is 4x lower resolution.

The Mira Pro runs an eye-watering $1,750, further impeding the viewing experience. Given price trends on other E-Ink devices, I'm pretty sure that's all but entirely driven by the display cost itself.

Unfortunately AFAICT, Onyx BOOX still isn’t publishing their Linux kernel modification or sending source on request which is a violation of GNU GPL 2.

Yes, I'm aware of that, and it's a strike against the company.

Is it possible to make a black or silver frame (ideally with thinner bezels)? If so, I'd gladly buy one (wood does not fit in my current theme).

You could take the wooden frame and paint it black maybe? And maybe pair the stand black as well, or use another stand from Amazon?

I can send you the disassembly instructions (email me at info@invisible-computers.com) and then you can disassemble it before painting.

Or if you want I can paint it for you, but I would have to charge a bit extra :)

Ooh. Purchased. Let’s see how this goes…

what screen did you use for the e-ink part of the display/who manufactures it?

It’s a model similar to the 7.5 inch screen by waveshare

The screens are expensive for everybody. For devices with e-ink display, the screen is often more than the rest of the BOM combined. That's why there are only premium device on the market, except Kindle, which is subsidized by Amazon.

When they first appeared, I was sure the price would drop with increasing volumes, but that has not happened. Probably they can't get good enough yield, and it's not a product suitable to sell with dead pixels, like a TV, where cheap models have dead pixels while the premium models don't.

It possibly hasn't happened because, at least from what I've heard previously here on HN, the e-ink company has a monopoly on the patents needed to make them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143779

It sounds like they might have just recently expired but I imagine there is a catchup phase.

In the link you posted, please scroll down to the reply by Robinsoh - the "patent thicket" claim is bullshit, and people keep repeating the myth without a real source to back it up.

E-ink is expensive because it's a niche product that lacks economy of scale, and it's a niche product because it does almost nothing that can't be done by LCDs (which are incredibly flexible). E-ink is amazing, but it doesn't have the best business case.

To be honest, that commenter probably knows more than I do about the tech. But on the business side, I think that would be a stronger position if there wasn't just one single company that owns the entire market. OLEDs were originally very expensive, niche, and had yield problems but competition has driven development -- bringing prices down, improving yields, and solving many the issues that made them a niche application.

The commenter said that a billion dollars are needed to make the technology scale but The EInk Corporation itself raised only 1/10th of that and now they're making a billion dollars per year off it -- why haven't they brought prices down then?

If you look at their annual reports, EInk sure seems to think their patents are important; they mention patents as part of their "strategic roadmap" every year. Their initial patents were in the late 90s, and the last few years the royalty revenue amounts on E Ink's revenue breakdowns have been dropping every single year as they shift more and more into actually making the screens. The data lines up IMO.

The big commercial selling point of E-ink is that it should be able to survive zero power.

I assume that's why its first killer app has been pricetags. A store with 5000 items each requiring a LCD pricetag would be constantly replacing little batteries or having to reprogram units if they popped out of a plug or rail-basewd power system.

I think some of the interest from the hobbyist brows is less about that and more about other aspects of the technology-- it has a bit of a distinct look and excellent full-sun readability.

A hypothetical nonbacklit high res grayscale LCD would have some similar properties and might be more viable at small scale; I know they're making basically that in small sizes for use in resin 3D printers.

Yes, e-ink pricetags are one niche of e-ink devices. The other niche is e-readers (which are a luxury version of installing an e-reading app on your phone). Maybe the niche of solar-powered billboards (e.g. bus-stop signs) will also take off, but that's about it.

E-ink is great, but it is niche and basically everything that you can do with an EPD, you can do with an LCD. E-ink screens are in the at best tens of millions, whereas LCDs are in the billions per quarter - there are over 6 billion smartphone owners in the world already, and LCDs are in everything from supermarket self-checkout kiosks to laptops to smart fridges, they utterly demolish E-Ink in scale.

I love e-ink screens, but there's no denying the tech's business-case is rather marginal and that won't change anytime soon.

>A store with 5000 items each requiring a LCD pricetag would be constantly replacing little batteries

Errr, not really. LCD price tags existed before e-ink (and still do) and battery life was not much worse. It's something like 1.5x-2x tops, so enough to make business sense, but not orders of magnitudes earth shattering as one might assume.

In fact, most retail shops that have anything other than paper use LCD price tags. If they are making the switch is because they expect to be frequently updating them... and then any eInk battery life advantage evaporates.

> If they are making the switch is because they expect to be frequently updating them...

Not necessarily that. They're making the switch to digital price tags because it's much quicker and easier to run promos on certain items to clear the shelves before closing time on perishable goods, but most importantly, they're making the switch because when employee have to manually change paper price tags, mistakes happen far too often, and stores end up in situations where the price on the self doesn't match the price on the cash register, angering customers who in certain jurisdictions are entitled to compensation for the store's pricing mistake.

Digital price tags ensure such mistakes are gone saving the store money over time.

Digital wrist watches can go 10+ years on a single battery, and they typically have transistors switching at 32kHz (as opposed to price tags, which could be completely static until you press a button).

I'm not sure I agree with that; I paid €120 for my PocketBook e-reader, which wasn't the cheapest one, and I bought it in-store (could have gotten a better price online probably, but comparing devices in-store was useful).

Now, while €120 isn't nothing, it's also not a whole lot, and it's cheap enough that with a few books a year you're saving money.

Amazon's 6" Kindle sells for €110 by the way, but is missing some features my Pocketbook has, and the 6.8" Kindle Paperwhite with comparable features sells for €170. Doesn't seem that much cheaper to me.

Are you sure it's artificial and not related to yields? As in, it's more likely you get a dead pixel on a larger screen.

The answer would be "chiplets" of course, assembling bigger screens out of smaller ones. At the hobby leven, I think something decent could be built out of a few second hand kindle screens, if you plan the seams as part of the aesthetic.

> As in, it's more likely you get a dead pixel on a larger screen.

Aside from the ink capsules and higher voltage (though still very low), E ink is almost identical to LCD and probably slightly easier to make. There's a TFT (which can have a larger footprint, since it doesn't need to be transparent) on the back, an LC or E ink capsule layer, and an ITO electrode. Dead pixels are almost always caused by damage or defects in the TFT.

I wouldn't say it's artificially out of reach, though- setting a line up to produce large panels is a high opportunity cost. If anything is artificial about it, it's that you presumably can't buy E ink capsules yourself. With enough effort you might be able to separate the top glass from an LCD TV, dissolve the LC, and replace it with E ink, but I have no idea how you'd do that. No promises it wouldn't burn out the TFT immediately.

Acronym-expansion as a service:

TFT: Thin-film transistor

LC: Liquid crystal

ITO: Indium-tin oxide

LCD: Liquid crystal display (though this one's widely known).

(Please expand acronyms on first use. Even, or especially, where they strike you as well-known or obvious.)

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>E ink is almost identical to LCD and probably slightly easier to make

False. E-ink film, especially color, is definitely more complex to get right than LCDs. Sure, e-ink displays have the same TFT layer underneath just like LCD displays, but the e-ink pigment and film is tricky to make.

I have had this bookmarked for a few years to do as a side project but the acquisition of a new son has put all this aside for the foreseeable future unfortunately, perhaps you can make use of it:

https://alexanderklopping.medium.com/an-updated-daily-front-...

Would strongly recommend using another language than PHP to make it work, but the LLM du jour would probably translate it to any other language for you.

Here was the original post that inspired that one: https://onezero.medium.com/the-morning-paper-revisited-35b40...

OT but... Did you mean addition or can you actually say acquisition in English?

I was making a humorous reference to startup life. You don't normally say that in English, I was playing with the language. My son is actually awesome, and yes, he is an "addition" (sum of one total). =)

Thank you for learning English! As a speaker of (to some extent) 3 other languages, I for one appreciate anyone who has struggled to learn English as an (N+1)th language.

same. I have these exact urls bookmarked for years

> It's a shame that this technology is kept artifically out of reach to hobbyists.

This is still an issue where a single company controls the entire tech, right? When do the relevant patents expire?

The patents on the original black and white displays have already expired. They are just really hard to make at large size without defects.

Newer versions that are easier to manufacture or have color are still under patents for a while.

They don't - the Display Electronic Slurry (DES) is a competing 'e-paper' tech that E-Ink corp haven't patented. It has slightly different pros and cons (it has a more defined checkerboard pattern which isn't as nicely grainy as E-Ink corp's MED, but it let's them pour the 'ink' straight into the substrate which potentially has higher contrast and resolution as a result), but ultimately that's irrelevant nitpicking if patents are causing the price of E-Ink screens to be crazily high as people keep falsely claiming. If DES could deliver screens at half the price, then Wiwood (?) would eat E-Ink's lunch.

Expiry isn't the issue. In America (and Canada I'm pretty sure) you have the right to use a patent at a fair cost determined by a court. Or you can try to just use the patent anyway and wait for the court case to come to you.

Nope. A patent is an exclusive right yo an invention. They aren't forced to license it to you or anyone else.

There are a few exceptions in US law (e.g., provisions in the Defense Production Act) that can allow a patent owner to be compelled to license their IP. IANAL but I believe this generally requires an officially declared emergency of some kind.

There are additional exceptions short of a declared emergency, but rarely invoked. So in practice I agree this is unlikely to happen with e-ink displays. But for legal nerds I'll elaborate anyway.

Some exceptions are obviously inapplicable here, e.g. special rules for plant varieties [1] and nuclear energy [2]. The one most likely to apply to e-ink displays is that, under the Bayh-Dole act, if an invention was funded by government grants, and the patent holder fails to make it widely available, the government has so-called "march-in rights" to license it to third parties themselves. However this has never been successfully used. Wikipedia summarizes: "Though this right is, in theory, quite powerful, it has not proven so in terms of its practical application" [3].

[1] Perhaps because it's controversial to allow plant varieties to be patented in the first place, the statute for them has an explicit compulsory license clause (see the last subsection): https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/7/chapter-57/subchap...

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2183

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act#Petition...

Yeah, I initially threw in some caveats but removed them for brevity and because they don't really apply to the topic at hand (eink).

I mean, someone can also compel you to license your IP using a hammer.

The exception would be standard essential patents, as far as I know.

The standards bodies can encourage FRAND licensing, but there is no legal requirement backing it beyond the patent holder agreeing to it.

Thanks for the correction, I misremembered that, it seems. On the other hand, an SEP holder not licensing the patent with FRAND terms will have a hard time to establish any kind of standard, in some scenarios.

I agree with you, it would be counterproductive. The more common occurrance is that one of the patent-holding entities opts out of the FRAND agreement, holding all the implementors of the standard hostage. An example would be Forgent's acquisition of a patent they interpreted to be essential to JPEG. The patent was eventually invalidated in the courts, but it caused a lot of headaches for a few years in the early 2000s.

>It's a shame that this technology is kept artifically out of reach to hobbyists.

This is a myth. They're not artificially expensive, they just have low economy of scale because they're a niche product. As you yourself said, you're tempted to just buy a large LCD display instead.

> exorbitant cost.

Is that fundamental to the technology, or is it just it being a low-volume niche product?

Not exactly what you're looking for, but check out dakboard.

They even have a pi version

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