Comment by mafuyu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mafuyu | Hacker News Reader

I'm working on a credit card sized e-paper device. It has an Arduino, USB, Real Time Clock, and a battery, and fits in your wallet. Still doing hardware designs.

Some potential applications:

* Replace all the barcodes in your wallet (loyalty/membership)

* Google Auth TOTP

* QR Codes (links/BTC wallets)

* Interactive nametag

* e-book/text display

* date/time display with wireless phone sync over BTLE

* act as a USB device and display text/notifications from your computer

I'm not completely sure if the use cases are convincing enough - would you buy such a device? This revision won't have any wireless and instead will be focused more towards electronics/Arduino enthusiasts - dead simple to program over USB with provided libraries and documentation. You can use it as an Arduino/e-paper dev board and code neat apps for it that you can actually use.

E paper is a pretty cool technology that's tough to adapt to use cases.

Have you thought about potentially replacing office or grocery store signage? Those displays typically need to be changed by hand daily,.monthly, or yearly and could benefit from auto or remote updates.

I don´t see why you would use one if those when almost everyone has a phone in their pocket these days. Usually with and app or NFC chip that will do those things.

Indeed, smartphones can do a lot of things, but not one thing particularly well. My original goal with this design was to replace the 'card wallet' apps for phones, as the barcodes never seemed to scan very well through the glass screens. I've narrowed it down since then to be more for toying around with Arduino/e-paper development, at least for this iteration.

This sounds pretty cool. Would the hardware be open source so that other people can build their own?

Yeah, definitely. The whole point would be to have a completely open hardware design and software library so that people can build off of it.

I'm interested in the idea for sure. Is there any way I can get updates on the project (github, website, newsletter)?

I'm just playing around with designs/dev boards and building the concept privately at the moment. However, I've gotten some funding for it, and the goal is to get a working prototype out by Spring. If there's enough interest then, I'll work on it full-time over the summer to get a product out.

If you want to follow the project, this repo will have more in the future: https://github.com/Hylian/arducard

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