
E-ink wifi display project - ck2
https://davidgf.net/page/41/e-ink-wifi-display
======
lhl
For the longest while I wanted a portable e-ink display for outdoor use (just
something good enough for terminal, text editing, maybe some light browsing),
but sadly nothing ever really materialized. There are larger panels available
[1] but require enough low level work that nothing's ever really materialized.

There's one Chinese company that's shipping a 13.3" USB display ($1300 for the
first gen [2] or $799 to pre-order a second-gen product [3]) and surprisingly
enough, 10" Pixel Qi screens are also being sold, with some support for about
$400 [4] or for about $150 from random Chinese retailers. [5]

Currently, the easiest/most cost effective options for getting a large e-ink
display showing content are either buying a used 9.7" Kindle DX (around
$150-200) and hacking VNC onto it [6] or doing running VNC on the 13.3" Onyx
BOOX MAX (~$650, in short supply, it runs Android 4.0 and has wifi, BT and a
pressure sensitive touchscreen/stylus so has some potential) [7]

[1]
[https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=8492...](https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=84926)

[2] [http://www.solcomputer.com/sol-cvs-e-ink-
monitor.html](http://www.solcomputer.com/sol-cvs-e-ink-monitor.html)

[3] [http://the-digital-reader.com/2016/05/26/dasung-
paperlike-e-...](http://the-digital-reader.com/2016/05/26/dasung-paperlike-e-
ink-monitor-up-for-pre-order-on-indiegogo-799/)

[4] [http://www.solcomputer.com/pixel-qi-
display-2.html](http://www.solcomputer.com/pixel-qi-display-2.html)

[5]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=pixel+qi+display&oq=pixel+qi...](https://www.google.com/search?q=pixel+qi+display&oq=pixel+qi+display&tbm=shop)

[6] [https://tinyapps.org/docs/e-ink-
monitor.html](https://tinyapps.org/docs/e-ink-monitor.html)

[7] [http://www.onyx-international.com/index.php/en/boox-
products...](http://www.onyx-international.com/index.php/en/boox-products/max)

~~~
giancarlostoro
I would love this, every time I'm reading off my Kindle I wish that it could
go online so I could read blog posts and some websites. I don't like the eye
strain I get after being on the computer for far too long.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
I like reading on my HP Stream 11 with Linux installed, I can run redshit and
set the colour temperature of the screen really low (currently on 1800
Kelvin), and then run this command:

    
    
       echo 200 >/sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness
    

to set the brightness below the default minimum (change the value 200 as
required)

I can comfortably read on this screen in complete darkness.

I have hotkey set for these commands.

~~~
nextos
I've been toying with the idea of using an AMOLED screen with inverted colors
for reading. That should be very close to eink, as AMOLED doesn't emit any
light for black.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
That's a good idea. I recently put my phone screen on greyscale and inverted
the colours. So much less obnoxious.

------
andraz
A ready-made platform is offered by Visionect - their dev kits for system
integrators:
[https://www.visionect.com/development_kits](https://www.visionect.com/development_kits)
. Meant for professional use and thus the price.

It works by using the display purely as a framebuffer, everything is rendered
on server and sent over wifi/3g. It gets you amazing autonomy times and is
easily powered by solar in outdoor installations.

disclaimer: founders are friends

~~~
gh02t
Wow, those are really cool and pretty much what I had in mind. It's a shame
that the prices are so... extravagant. I understand that they don't care about
the hobby market, but it still sucks they don't have one for around $100-$150.

------
ovi256
I wanted to create one of these out of a Kindle.

The easiest way would be to display a custom page in the Kindle's browser and
use the meta refresh property to reload the page periodically. This would not
have good battery life.

A better way would be a custom program running on a kindle that would: enable
the wifi, load the content to be displayed from a server as an image, disable
wifi, save the image as a custom screensaver, turn off until it's time to redo
it. The custom screensaver is displayed with the Kindle turned off, which
would lead to very good battery life. There are people building custom
firmwares for the kindle, I wonder how difficult it would be to code this.

~~~
dTal
Answer: not that difficult. Knocked this shell script together just for you.
Totally untested, and as it doesn't use the screensaver the Kindle itself
might stomp on it going in and out of suspend, but it should get you started.

    
    
      #!/bin/sh
      
      sleeptime=600 #seconds
      url="http://whatever/formatted-for-kindle.png"
      tmp_image="/tmp/image.png"
      
      wifienable() {lipc-set-prop com.lab126.cmd wirelessEnable 1}
      wifidisable() {lipc-set-prop com.lab126.cmd wirelessEnable 0}
      sleepfor() {lipc-set-prop -i com.lab126.powerd rtcWakeup $1}
      
      wait_for_wifi() {return `lipc-get-prop com.lab126.wifid cmState | grep CONNECTED | wc -l`;} #return true if keyword not found
      wait_for_ready_suspend() {return `powerd_test -s | grep Ready | wc -l`;}
      
      while true;
      	do wifienable
      	while wait_for_wifi; do sleep 1; done
      	wget -O $tmp_image $url
      	eips -g $tmp_image
      	wifidisable
      	while wait_for_ready_suspend; do sleep 1; done
      	sleepfor $sleeptime
      done

------
nicpottier
I'd pay real money for something like this that had an open API so you could
build your own widgets or hack it to do other things.

Double bonus if it had say 3 buttons on it (or d-pad and two buttons for
generic navigation).

~~~
luka-birsa
You can. As mentioned in other comments we provide a development platform for
E Ink displays that comes with open API and the ability to quickly hack
together stuff using HTML.

We support WiFi, 3G and Ethernet and you can get sizes from 6" \- 32". Check
out our online docs [1].

[1] [http://docs.visionect.com](http://docs.visionect.com)

~~~
joshvm
How easy (and expensive) is it to buy OEM displays? The products you sell look
cool, but seem to cater for the commercial market with economy of scale. If I
want to got to EINK and buy a 6" Spectra panel, is that even possible as a
hobbyist? Plastic Logic look the same.

If you look on Digikey, the best you can do is about 3-4 inches it seems. So
for very simple stuff e.g. I want to add a basic non-volatile display to some
sensor I've hooked up to a microcontroller, there aren't many easy options.

~~~
luka-birsa
Access to panels is possible, you just need to find the right distributor. But
getting the display is just a small part of the story. You need to build your
driving electronics and figure out how to drive the display. 3-4 inches are
also usually much simpler to drive, you can use a TCON and there's no waveform
management, etc...

The fact that this is much harder than it seems (hardware is non-mainstream,
access to documentation is limited, support is very hard to get, displays need
special driving chips) actually prompted us to provide a development platform
for E Ink. It took us years to figure everything out and for somebody wanting
to prototype something this is a show stopper.

As far as pricing goes, the 6" panels are priced approachable, while the large
displays still need to hit the mass production price points. Obviously if you
buy from us in bulk we can provide you much better pricing than a price for a
development kit, but E Ink is not cheap.

~~~
linuxkerneldev
I like how with words like "non-mainstream hardware", "acess to documentation
is limited" you make it sound like using E Ink tech is incredibly complex and
that mere mortals would not be able to do it on their own. Then at the end you
casually mention that your company, Visionect can help. I googled and found
that you are selling $6000 devel kits. I'm curious what is the price you're
getting the displays for?

~~~
benmcnelly
I understand your frustration, I too just want access to decently priced, and
various sizes of e-ink displays. From my time playing with the little adafruit
displays, I also get where Visonect is coming from as a whole stack (hardware,
controller, api, software) that makes it easier to just get up and going
sounds pretty dang great.

I think what it comes down to for me, is I am not buying a dev kit to get
hooked into an ecosystem that I don't have really clear pricing on. Which is
really to bad. I think if you had a cheaper wifi only 6" model that people
could afford to throw away money on just to test ideas out, then you would get
way more people interested.

------
hmottestad
I made something similar, or with the similar intent at least. Turned my old
sony ebook into a "wifi-display". I simply disabled sleep, opened up a website
and put it in a frame.

[http://fluffyelephant.com/2015/12/reuse-my-ebook-
reader/](http://fluffyelephant.com/2015/12/reuse-my-ebook-reader/)

Now it shows the weather and the subway times. It also doesn't flash the
entire screen when updating the subway times, because Sony optimised that in
their web browser.

~~~
lentil_soup
that looks really cool! any chance of you putting the code you used for that
website somewhere?

------
benmcnelly
I really want to get my hands on some flexible Color ePaper displays whenever
those come out :D

~~~
Someone1234
Me too my friend, me too.

E-ink usage has been underwhelming/disappointing. When the technology was
first announced I thought it would take the world by storm, but all we wound
up with was eBook Readers and little else.

I really hope that color is the missing piece of the pie, and we'll wind up
with color e-ink photo frames, LCDs in adverts displaced by color e-ink, and
even secondary screens which are e-ink based.

It is such a cool technology, almost zero energy use between updates, that has
been ignored and under-used. It legitimately makes me sad.

I guess nobody wanted to be that "dated" manufacturer who used a black & white
screen on something in 2016, no matter what the benefits.

~~~
luka-birsa
We're changing that and helping E Ink to break through into digital signage
and there's actually a lot happening in this segment.

You have bus stops, buses, traffic signs, museum labels, room booking signage,
smart digital prices, buildings, queueing systems, outdoor ad panels,...

Check our blog for some examples:
[http://blog.visionect.com](http://blog.visionect.com)

~~~
frik
Great and all.

But

> smart digital prices

End consumer will hate you. One of the worst ideas ever.

~~~
benmcnelly
"Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they
could that they didn't stop to think if they should."

------
bigredhdl
Very nice. This kind of thing has been on my vaporware todo list for a while.
I'm glad someone just did it. I really like your frame builder concept.

------
tannerc
Where would someone with zero hardware experience start to work on projects
like this?

I have a vision of a modern sticky note powered by your phone that can relay
information to this type of small, e-ink display. But I have no idea how to go
about developing it... any pointers?

~~~
luka-birsa
You could try using our development kit [1] which is a production ready
version of OPs system.

[1]
[https://www.visionect.com/development_kits](https://www.visionect.com/development_kits)

~~~
rvdmei
Maybe SeeNote [1] could be what you are looking for. Only preorder now, but
looks really nice. I would really like give it a go, but I don't like
preorders. [1] [https://www.getseenote.com](https://www.getseenote.com)

~~~
tannerc
This is exactly what I want to _build_ but not something I want to buy.

The reason is because I feel like SeeNote is overkill, like they took the
elegant idea of modernizing the sticky note and added things like weather and
prompts for no apparent reason.

If I could build a stripped-down version of this myself, that would be ideal.
I just don't have any clue where to start.

~~~
benmcnelly
Nobody does, because there is no open source "visionect", but there really
should be. They have put in the work to make a simple stack (dev kit) for
working with the tech, but you can't just borrow that stack and source cheap
panels. I would say the market is wide open for someone to do what they are
doing, but crowd fund it, open source the controllers, hardware, software etc

------
zwieback
Why remove the SD socket? It makes sense to get rid of the NAND to cut down on
power but it seems like the SD socket could be useful and that STM32 has a
built-in SDIO controller.

------
luka-birsa
I'm very impressed that you managed to create a nice DIY replica of our
development kit.
[https://www.visionect.com/development_kits](https://www.visionect.com/development_kits)

We do the same in our Visionect Platform - a server component streams images
to a WiFi, 3G or ETH enabled E-Ink device. We do sizes from 6" (proper device
in casing) to 32" (in color as well).

~~~
lhl
Super neat stuff, looks like you guys have a solution that fills a big gap
(the big disconnect is that you have hardware hackers who don't build up the
stack or high level devs who have things they want to build but don't want to
bring up panels to do it).

What's the refresh rate/interactivity/frame rate for your devices? Looks like
you guys have lots of awesome options - are there videos of the devices in
action or the dev environment?

Are the high prices of devkits primarily driven by the panel cost or for other
reasons?

~~~
luka-birsa
Refresh rate: ~750 ms for 4 bit and up to ~125 ms for 1 bit

Videos of device in action: [https://www.visionect.com/blog/kindle-users-can-
your-reader-...](https://www.visionect.com/blog/kindle-users-can-your-reader-
do-this-flappy-bird-on-e-paper) (our previous generation device)

High prices are driven due to price of screens and the amount of support we
provide. It's a development kit, intended for customers building products.
We're not that much of DIY (like a hacked Kindle or the OPs solution), but
rather a production ready solution that you can use to prototype and later
deploy in field. Examples [1], [2], [3]:

[1]: [https://www.visionect.com/blog/joan-honored-for-its-eco-
desi...](https://www.visionect.com/blog/joan-honored-for-its-eco-design-at-
ces-2016) [2]: [https://www.visionect.com/blog/smart-shelf-labels-on-
electro...](https://www.visionect.com/blog/smart-shelf-labels-on-electronic-
paper) [3]: [https://www.visionect.com/blog/electronic-paper-at-london-
bu...](https://www.visionect.com/blog/electronic-paper-at-london-bus-stops)

~~~
wastedhours
Really interesting product selection - obviously on the pricey end when the
market here is looking for hacky project type prices, but an open version of
Joan for people to get playing with your stack at that £299/$350 price point
might work for feeding dev support further up the chain?

~~~
luka-birsa
We tried that previously, but it didn't work out. People that want a cheap
version, still complained about the price and suggested a hacked Amazon Kindle
as a viable alternative.

~~~
wastedhours
Fair enough! Though if you ever did want to explore that again, I'd be
interested in a more entry-level to prototype some signage ideas (email in
profile).

------
teekert
So cool. Wish the Raspberry Pi foundation came up with a Pi0 compatible e-ink
display. I get the hacking fun part but it would be so nice.

~~~
raphman_
off-topic: gangadhargs, FYI, your comments are shown as [dead] (since about
four years ago).

~~~
raphman_
(apparently no longer)

------
Already__Taken
E-ink seems very underused. What I want is a smartwatch whose face is just an
e-ink display with a single, mechanical hand on top. With those I can program
the face and hand motion myself. Rarely updating the face to save as much
power as possible yet cheap always on display from the physical hand.

------
Nr7
Too bad this never amounted to anything:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwGO2Ky-b8k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwGO2Ky-b8k)

------
frik
A "third screen" e-ink monitor would be great.

~~~
Eric_WVGG
here you go — [https://tinyapps.org/docs/e-ink-
monitor.html](https://tinyapps.org/docs/e-ink-monitor.html)

~~~
frik
Kindle DX is from 2008/09!

------
dmritard96
we are doing something similar (ESP and Eink) but wrapped up in a nice package
and (for now) focused on sensors/controls. we are considering an sdk and hdk
possibly to open it up for some custom applications/builds/apps

[https://flair.co/products/puck](https://flair.co/products/puck)

------
DenisM
I dream of a lightweight e-ink typewriter. Sometimes I want to write without
all the distraction of the "normal" devices.

~~~
hug
You might want one of these, then:
[https://getfreewrite.com/](https://getfreewrite.com/)

$500 for a mechanical keyboard strapped to an eink display. Syncs with
Dropbox. Sounds right up your alley.

~~~
TylerE
Funny how they define it as a hardcore device for professional/serious use,
and then define 'typical usage' as 30 minutes per day for purposes of being
able to claim a seemingly absurdly long battery life.

But I guess "about 15 hours" sounds a lot less impressive than "3-4 weeks".

