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Comment by wiether | Hacker News Reader

I love my eInk displays, I love my bike head unit.

But I don't see how they both fit together honestly.

  The pros of eInk:
  - low energy usage -> don't matter, current GPS units have +30 hours of battery life already
  - low eye strain -> don't matter, you don't look at the screen for hours at a time
  - visibility -> don't matter, current GPS units adapt to ambient light
  - angle visibility -> don't matter, the screen is right in front of you

  The cons of eInk:
  - refresh rate -> yeah, I don't want the map display to be laggy
  - visibility in the dark -> tunnels, tree cover... I don't want to my GPS to be invisible
  - lack of color -> colors provide lots of information on the map display

Anyway, as long as you have fun doing this and some people enjoy it also, congrats!

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  >don't matter... don't matter... don't matter...

Apparently current GPS screens are compatible with your eyes and the viewing conditions you find yourself in. Congrats! May your eyes never darken and your trails be easy!

For others, some of those advantages do matter. Different strokes for different folks! Cheers mate.

This device has a backlight enabled by a physical button, and navi refresh rate doesn't matter because you're riding and not staring at it. 1Hz is fine for a reference.

Not sure why needing less battery or having better at-a-glance visibility would be such a bad thing.

One need not love a device, that's ok. But digging to invent a reason to hate it also doesn't seem necessary.

  > But digging to invent a reason to hate it also doesn't seem necessary.

I don't see where I expressed any kind of hate towards the device.

Refresh rate does kind of matter. 1Hz imposes an average 0.5s latency on any update, which would be obnoxious in some situations.

Quite normal on most bike computers already with a slow refresh, even if they're able to refresh faster. You can't really read a number if it keeps changing all the time.

> 0.5s latency on any update, which would be obnoxious in some situations.

What situation?

i can push it as high as 20Hz.

For me, it matters only when I'm futzing with the map: dragging around or zooming. For the rest of the info on the display, anything more than 500ms interval seems like a waste of power.

You’re responding really inappropriately to someone participating productively in a discussion.

IMO at least a better one to do would be a transflective LCD like the original pebble watches used.

I already have a transreflective screen on my current mass-produced bike computer. I don’t see a need to make another one, whereas I’ve never seen an eInk one; I think that’s genuinely cool and the main innovation here.

Heh, I just got a waveshare RLCD to play with sunlight visible higher refresh rate, but then I compared it side by side with the exact e-paper display for this project and I felt buyer’s remorse; the contrast is soooo much worse on the LCD.

Maybe it would have fared better if I was out in sunlight viewing them, but seeing this thing in person sold me on e-paper for this use case

That’s what most bike gps screens are now.

refresh rate is sort of a non issue. i can push the refresh rate to up to 20Hz, it is largely unnecessary for this project.

it has a nice backlight (basically identical to a kindle display)

color is fair, but i dont miss it.

i do absolutely love how readable it is in direct sunlight (when im mostly riding)

I find colour useful for a navigation map, mostly. I think the 4-colour eInk displays would be plenty for that, although they have refresh constraints iirc.

A good UI design would mostly avoid the need for colour.

I agree. But this could be a fun and cheap project to do with kids for their bikes :)

Well said. I don't understand who this would be for.

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