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Comment by conesus | Hacker News Reader

Hey HN, I helped build the Sol Reader glasses and would love to answer any questions. It helps that I've spent months using the glasses and can attest to the increased amount of reading these glasses have unlocked. I have a 2 year old and making time for reading books is hard, but now I've found chunks of phone time being replaced with Sol time, esp. in the middle of the night when I don't want to have a light on that wakes my partner.

One note on the screen resolution, the screenshot linked on this thread is from our SDL2 simulator. The actual page feels more like paper, with warm eink artifacts and slight character bleed. No one who puts these glasses on talks about the resolution, instead they all have this huge smile on their face.

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What are the advantages of the Sol Reader over paper books and other e-paper readers? Is the system able to adjust to the strength of your eyesight?

> Is the system able to adjust to the strength of your eyesight?

There is a per-eye diopter adjustment, ranging from 0 to -5.75, so you have quite a bit of focal adjustment.

> What are the advantages of the Sol Reader over paper books and other e-paper readers?

Not having to hold a book is huge, IMO. I didn't realize it until I started wearing my Sol Reader regularly, but it's basically as much work as watching TV while capturing the words of a book.

Also, the lack of light output means I can read in the middle of the night. There's dark mode and an ambient light sensor for auto-adjusting brightness.

Will it have an unlocked bootloader? sd card slot? Do you need an app to add book in the device? (sounds like it from the tech specs)

Is it sweat/water resistant?

So far the boot loader is unlocked and you can flash on top of it, although I don’t know why you’d want to since you’d have to rebuild an entire OS but it would be possible. Our waveforms were easy to get right so it’s not as simple as driving the eink displays with OSS drivers.

To add a book you can use a mobile app or text directly since we’re manually buying the books for now. Once we have a book marketplace it’ll be self serve on the mobile apps. We are planning side loading capabilities so you can use the mass storage device, but there’s a bit of preprocessing we’re doing to the epubs that we’ll have to replicate for self serve epubs. To get around that you can email an epub to add@solreader.com and we deliver it directly to your device. Handy!

The lenses that ship with these limited editions will be dust and moisture resistant. But if they drop in a tub all bets are off. That may change one day.

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