
Running an eInk Display with Elixir, Scenic and Nerves - lawik
http://underjord.io/an-eink-display-with-nerves-elixir.html
======
elcritch
Fellow Nerves enthusiast here. Having an easy-to-use (YMMV) eInk display
library in Elixir makes a whole slew of useful lab/tinker equipment feasible!
Shoutout to @lawik for taking the effort to port inky over. It's fairly
tedious to work with all the SPI and image buffer tweaks.

eInk's have nice readability for "around the lab" type equipment. Having a
nice Nerves compatible wrapper lowers that barrier of entry even more. Sure
you can do it with Python and a RPi Zero and perhaps some Ansible scripts or
PiBakery, but there's something great about being able to make a custom (e.g.
< 50 MB) embedded Linux sd-card image with proper SSH network/credentialing,
all in around as long as it takes to download a full Raspbian distro on a busy
network... I am planning on building a custom weighing station for simple
chemical titration next week and have a nice unused eInk display sitting
around.

~~~
Fredej
Where did you get a "nice unused eInk display" from? :) I've been meaning to
tinker with one at some point, but haven't gotten hold of one yet.

~~~
2rsf
AliExpres ? EBay ?

[https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32859117013.html](https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32859117013.html)

~~~
elcritch
Adafruit in my case
[https://www.adafruit.com/product/4195](https://www.adafruit.com/product/4195)

~~~
lawik
Accidental shopping, happens all the time :)

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johnday
I have a reMarkable Tablet and it is a really excellent hackable device. It's
actually a full-powered Linux machine with an e-ink display [I think about
10"? Never measured...]

It works brilliantly for music scoring, though the downscaling by about 10%
over standard A4 sizing takes a second to get used to.

~~~
m-p-3
Is there a decent email/calendar client for it?

~~~
AJRF
It runs linux so you could in theory run mutt or something like that to get
emails in when your on WiFi.

I've found with most of the homebrew-y stuff you need to create a launcher
that draws the application to the screen of the reMarkable, by default its
running a program called xochitl which handles the user interface, file
system, etc.

So to sum up, doable but not done...yet!

------
umvi
I've wanted a dual eink display for piano sheet music for a while, but it
seems that the only ones on the market are $2-5K+. I might try to dink around
with a raspberry pi and a few eink displays to see how hard it would be to
make a budget one.

~~~
dharma1
The 2x 13" screen eink tablets for music are about $1500. You can also use a
single screen 13" eink tablet and a footpad for turning pages, for about
$500-600. They all run Android so Bluetooth foot pedals for page turning work
fine.

Smaller 7-10" eink display tablets are even cheaper

~~~
umvi
Is the majority of that cost the eink displays? $1500 seems super high
considering a kindle is $100 (hard to tell if Amazon is subsidizing the cost
of the display though)

In my mind, you should be able to buy a dual eink display for <$500

~~~
dharma1
Yeah I think it's low volumes of 13.3" eink screens/tablets that drive the
price up. The small ones are really cheap

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jsjolen
I recently purchased a Kindle to restart my interest in reading and of course
the first thing I did was to figure out how to develop my own software for it.

It turns out that the Kindle runs an embedded version of Java without a GC.
This seems to have stifled the development quite a bit, so it's really cool to
see how Raspberry-Pi/Inky homebrew is becoming a thing.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
There's software which can be side-loaded on Kindles (and Kobos etc.), e.g.
Koreader, written in Lua:
[https://github.com/koreader/koreader](https://github.com/koreader/koreader)

~~~
therein
There is also plato.

Original repo:
[https://github.com/baskerville/plato](https://github.com/baskerville/plato)

libremarkable fork:
[https://github.com/darvin/plato](https://github.com/darvin/plato)

~~~
_emacsomancer_
I know of plato, but haven't used it before. Do you have experience using it?
/ are you able to compare it with koreader?

~~~
therein
I haven't used it as my primary driver but tested releases of it on my
Remarkable Tablet. As far as my experience went, it was pleasant and pretty
feature complete, at least as an ePUB, DJVU and PDF document reader.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
Ok, I installed it (it just sideloads like Koreader, so it doesn't 'overwrite'
anything) to try it out. It worked fine overall, but:

1) It took a lot longer to load than Koreader (so much so that I thought the
reader had frozen)

2) I couldn't figure out how to have it trim PDF whitespace as tightly as
Koreader does, which is important for being able to reasonably read pdf files.

3) I added additional fonts into its font directory (and I noticed that some
other fonts were already there), but for epubs I couldn't figure out how to
change the font from Libertinus Serif.

4) It's not clear that it has all of the advanced font features regarding
kerning & ligatures that Koreader has added. (I'm not sure what's enabled by
default in terms of kerning/ligatures since I couldn't change to a font that
I'm more familiar with.)

5) It generally seems to have fewer features than Koreader.

But:

6) Visually, the interface is cleaner-looking than Koreader's. And it's a
simpler (and perhaps easier/more intuitive) interface than Koreader's.

So perhaps I'd recommend it for someone who wanted something more
basic/easier, but at this point I'll stick with Koreader.

------
AlchemistCamp
I've been wanting to play with Scenic and still haven't gotten around to it
yet. Probably won't start with a Nerves project that requires buying this kind
of hardware, though.

~~~
lawik
That's fair. You can do plenty with Scenic entirely without hardware. And you
should, Scenic is great :)

------
FerretFred
_> An Inky display from Pimoroni. We've tested the Red PHAT_

I tested it too! It was actually really good as an NTP client clock attached
to a Pi Wireless Zero. I had it update every minute, then every 15 minutes it
would get the time from my Pi NTPD clock server and display the offset in red.
Longevity was excellent: it did 763,200 updates in its lifetime.

The Pi actually died following an attempt at an update but the display seems
to still be operational.

------
chansiky
I use a Dasung Paperlike Pro to do work on occasionally. I love it. It was
expensive but personally it was worth every penny. Nothing beats coding
outdoors with natural light. Pretty much the only thing its good for is
reading/writing, but that has its own benefits.

I had to customize colors in vim as well, since you lose all the colors when
you use eink, but that's only a marginal drawback.

~~~
rapind
I really really want an e-ink laptop, exactly for this purpose. I absolutely
love working outside, like on my patio or wherever. I've tried just about
every shade over the years, but anything other than basically enclosing the
space between your head and the screen gives you too much ambient light for
these LED screens.

~~~
chansiky
Yeah I get you, the human eye works logarithmically so we can see in very dark
spaces, but that means the light necessary to see a computer screen is a
fraction of what comes from daylight. People were not meant to breath hvac air
inside an unaturally lit cubicle. Fresh air, natural light, and proper sleep
cycles(up with the sun, down with the sun) I feel are my secret sources of
power.

------
juhatl
Thank you for the write-up! I've been looking for an excuse to dig deeper into
Scenic, and the allure of combining that with eInk makes it sound even more
fun. Ordering an Inky right away.

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i_am_nomad
As an artist, what I would love is an eInk that could be trimmed and shaped
(within reason). It won’t happen, of course - even the early promise of eInk
as “bendable” has mostly been shelved.

------
ForHackernews
Are there any mobile phones with eInk displays?

I've wanted a Lightphone2 [0] but it seems like it might be vapourware.

[0] [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/light-
phone-2#/](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/light-phone-2#/)

~~~
anarcat
The Kingrow does this: [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/kingrow-k1-the-
healthy-ph...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/kingrow-k1-the-healthy-
phone-cares-your-eyes/x/16580847#/)

It's still crowdfunding, but it seems they started mass production already and
it will be for real.

~~~
ForHackernews
This looks like almost exactly what I want! But they've only raised $78,000?
How can that possibly be enough to design and mass-produce a new mobile phone?

------
aiddun
What’s the current state of eInk/ePaper? I remember reading a couple years ago
that the industry was bogged down by patents. Wonder if costs have gone down.

~~~
2rsf
From the user perspective (I am looking for a paperwhite gen 3 replacement)
the price is more or less the same, and the technology haven't changed much
either since 2015- display contrast is the same, and is not getting closer to
a real black print on paper feeling, unless you crank up the backlight

------
userbinator
Something about this article just rubs me the wrong way --- it feels like CV
padding. So many buzzwords, so much complexity, so many layers of libraries
just to write to a display. I didn't know what Nerves was, so clicked over to
[https://nerves-project.org/](https://nerves-project.org/) and didn't learn
all that much more --- the home page there looks to be more marketing wank
than anything else (a lot of projects these days seem to have this affliction;
they'll tell you all the _great_ things you can do, but never answer the
question of _what it is_.) What's more, and this isn't specific to this
article but basically all e-ink products out there, those layers of complexity
almost certainly are not letting you use the display to its full potential;
they only offer a dumb framebuffer interface.

That's particularly disadvantaging with eInk, because if you drive the display
directly instead of using a pre-packaged controller, you can achieve effects
like partial redraws without flickering, and even theoretically infinite
levels of grayscale; here's a previous HN discussion of an article where
someone did just that:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140284](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140284)

The ED060SC4 seems to be one of the best for this; you can drive them
directly, they're reasonably large (800x600, 6") and cheap, and there's plenty
of information on them.

~~~
bnchrch
To be blunt. It seems like you care more about feeling important through
criticism that making sure that your criticism is valid.

~~~
dang
Please don't cross into personal attack. That breaks the site guidelines and
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