The Stasis of E-Ink | Hacker News Reader

The Stasis of E-Ink

allenc.com

17 pointsdaveoc6410 comments

E-ink is a real missed opportunity for smart homes. This is just a hunch but I suspect there is a niche in the smart home market for people that want their homes to be "informative" but not "smart".

An example:

A voice-enabled tablet (ala Echo Show) is intrusive and disrupts the aesthetics of the home. An e-ink display that has low/no interactivity but provides useful information blends into the home a lot better.

Unfortunately the smart-device market isn't interested and building your own seems to be difficult.

Does anybody know if there are useful libraries for displaying e-ink? It should be simple to use a low cost RPi board like a pico and connect it to an e-ink display fitted into a frame.

Check out adafruit on youtube and their store. They have some nice diy eink options that sound exactly like what you are suggesting. I agree it would be nice for this to also be available for non diy people too.

I’ve heard of adafruit before but haven’t looked at their stuff. Will check it out

Check out "The Invisible Screen" recently profiled here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38773669). I've seen quite a few people playing with e-ink, the problem is these things are still way too expensive...

Thanks will take a look! At the risk of sounding ignorant, I can’t understand why such seemingly simple peripherals are so expensive

Low volumes mainly, also EPD displays are hard to tame.

Seeing this way too late, apologies. Apparently the company which invented and patented the technology is trying to get as much revenue from it as possible. I think this is starting to change as people finding alternative approaches or at least something meaningfully different so as to not be covered by the patent, but it has not translated into more competition as of yet.

I think the threat to E-ink use/investment comes from smartphones and QR codes. With those, someone can use a scrap of regular paper to anchor an arbitrarily large amount of information. (Which can also be revised remotely.)

Even the use-case of grocery store price displays are somewhat threatened by "order ahead online."

Huh, I'm not sure why some folks felt the above comment was offensive. It's literally about the "Stasis" of E-Ink mentioned in the article.

The downside is you have the swipe down, tap, then scan, not just glance.

Maybe phones could have a dedicated "Turn on and scan" button that doesn't require unlocking for certain things, so it could be frictionless in the way that saying "hey Google" is.

The other issue is that it's cloud dependent, or else only works when you're on the same wifi. There is sadly no special instand connect wifi P2P URLs I know of, unfortunately, much as I'd love to see that happen.

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