This is amazing; thank you for the suggestion! I've thought turn-based games could work for e-ink, like correspondence chess or other play-by-mail type games.
Though personally, I don't see the need for e-ink except perhaps outdoors or in changing environments. Just setting the brightness at a decent value gives a good enough contrast; after all an e-ink display just reflects light so if the ambient lighting is constant you can just adjust your LED panel to that same overall brightness. I think the scrolling issues of e-ink would be a much greater source of eye strain and discomfort.
You can also use an off-white color as a background. Like HN does! It gives a similar feel as paper.
> I don't see the need for e-ink except perhaps outdoors or in changing environments.
Yes, but that is a huge deal. I consider it one of the biggest life changers that will come for a large part of the population. We've built our lives around the limitations of emissive displays. What if you didn't need to shield out the sun to be able to do office type jobs? What if the boss in the field on a work site could just sit down where they are when he needs to do some computer stuff and be able to show designs to his workers without having to bring all inside a room or go make prints?
I think it also depends greatly on where you are. For Europeans, e-ink might not be so interesting, since it's dark and cold there. And when the sun actually shines, they are on holiday anyway. But for places with a lot of sunshine, e-ink will change a lot of things. That might mean we'll have to let go of scrolling as a paradigm. But let's face it: scrolling only became the default because of bad UI choices and lazy designers. Paper moved from scrolls to pages eons ago.
Maybe you could put ambient sensors all around the monitor and simulate the effects of lighting on paper?
Or you could use the front camera, and you could even have 3D effects, so a real world light could be reflected in shiny stuff on screen, and cast shadows for non-flat content, etc.
> you can just adjust your LED panel to that same overall brightness
This is the kind of thing I would expect my monitor to do for me (unless I manually override it). Brightness AND color (so, cooler during day, when the sun is shining through the windows, warmer at night, when the lightbulbs try to approximate incandescent lighting).
That is impressive, though the display seems to be entirely in 1-bit mode, which is going to improve performance (and probably minimise ghosting) considerably.
That works for high-contrast content, but tends to fall apart where more subtle shading differences matter. Either greater pixel depth (16 greyscale shades are common), halftoning (surprisingly effective given ~300 dpi resolution) or dithering (somewhat higher quality, avoides Moire effects) would be able to tackle considerably more content well.
(Based on my experience with an Onyx MAX Lumi, similarly-sized screen, multiple display options, and a wide range of content.)
The article mentions that there is greyscale rendering possible, but that text is first rendered 1-bit, with 1-bit greyscale applied after a few seconds for antialiasing. My experience with high DPI (dots per inch) displays is that antialiasing is far less an issue, both because the individual pixel size is so small and because with a monochrome screen, the reduced resolution of colour displays (where three pixels are required to provide colour for any given region) isn't a factor. Effectively the pixel density of a monochrome display is about 3x greater than an equivalent colour display, based on the same nominal DPI / dot pitch.
This looks fantastic for a dedicated code/terminal monitor (or spreadsheets). The scroll refresh rate could be a bit disorienting for mouse-scrolling but would be a non-issue for keyboard-based scroll such as in vim.
Most of the heavy lifting is done by MobileSheets. I have the e-paper version installed on my tablet, and the android version on my phone. You have to buy them separately; the e-paper one is only for sale on the online shop, but you get an APK and punch in a license key.
I do the set management on my phone, and then sync it over to the tablet. Phone's faster UX makes it less cumbersome, but this is mostly for convenience. The sync features are built in, and can be useful for more than just library management; when I'm playing with other horn players who have the app on an iPad or another e-ink display, we can sync it together and have page turns and other features occur automatically across all of us.
When performing or practicing, I often have the phone set next to the bigger screen, showing the upcoming page. They are synchronized using the same means as across different players.
For page turning, I use either an AirTurn Duo or an AirTurn Quad. The Quad mostly stays at home, with the extra pedals used to control midi playback. MobileSheets has built-in support for the AirTurn, so setup is a breeze.
Finally, a decent chunk of the music I get is old sheet music from sheet music libraries; I simply scan them to PDFs. For more modern pieces, or pieces where more work needs to be done (i.e. transposing, rearranging, etc), I use LilyPond.
Really impressive work! A lot of thought has clearly gone into working around constraints in an aesthetically pleasing and functional way. That kind of end to end polish is pretty rare in my experience, but makes a huge difference on the finished product.
EPDC stands for E-paper display controller, correct?
I found the Caster Verilog on your github repo. Are you planning on shipping with all the controller logic on an FPGA?
Interesting and cool approach. Is this something that is already commonplace in the display industry? I have seen VGA controllers on (bigger) Xilinxes years ago as demos but I haven't read about it on shipped display-related products.
Thanks for sharing. I went through Wenting's blog and projects earlier and was in awe; I hope I can find a way to follow their updates somehow now that Twitter's gone and there's no RSS feed.
It's gonna cost like $5000 because of all the eink patents, huh.
I would LOVE an eink display to help my tired eyes while I'm emacsing. But the patent BS and the high costs make it impractical for me to spend that much scratch at this time.
No, the high price of an e-ink device is not due to patents; it has more to do with market size, need, constraints of the device, suitable use cases, and many other socio-economic factors that come into play. With that said, we hope to offer different products at different price ranges.
E-ink isn't particularly expensive, only compared to LCDs. And LCDs are cheap because they have massive economy of scale - they sell literally billions of screens per quarter.
I would absolutely love to "upgrade" my display on my notebook to e-ink or a paper like backlight free display. The only thing I'd love more is to upgrade it to OLED, basically, I'd like light to not shine in my eyes needlessly.
Ummm... OLED very much shines into your eyes though. What's worse, if you don't want it to shine at top brightness it will additionally flicker, because unlike LCD it cannot be directly dimmed without PWM. If it's technically possible none of the OLED panels do it, even in top iphones.
Hopefully, someday, once we complete our EPDC, I plan to contact the PINE64 community and MNT Reform to see if they would be interested in incorporating it into their devices.
Interesting that 'laptop' won the poll. The e-ink screens are quite fragile, and are actually the only device that I have ever broken.
Comparatively, my laptop already went through so much abuse that I'm pretty sure would have destroyed a standard laptop equipped with an e-ink screen. Have you already taken that into account and plan for a design that would take that into account? Are the potential buyers aware of it, or would you risk facing backlash because many screens would be inadvertently broken?
The demo is impressive. I bought a Mira Pro yesterday so I'm excited to see more options in the space.
From personal experience, carrying around a portable E-Ink monitor, plugging in the cables, and the initial set-up gets tiring. Some tablets are a better choice, but they mainly use Android, which may or may not work for someone, depending on your workflow.
I see why people gravitate to a laptop, a portable form factor, or a secondary 'focus' machine; in the end, each option has certain advantages and drawbacks.
Yes, we are accounting for abuse and the daily wear and tear in our design.
Having used tablets with external keyboards (both integrated into cases and freestanding), as well as laptops, my on-the-go preference would be a flyweight laptop with integrated keyboard and e-ink screen. Low battery consumption, universally-readable screen, real keyboard, Linux, and low distractions.
Onyx BOOX + Bluetooth keyboard + Termux ... gets me some of the way there, but it's not quite the same, and it's cumbersome to set up. I'd avoid Android if I could.
Thing is that a freestanding (and lightweight) display is also quite useful on its own, for reading, and any hybrid design is going to bump weight up a lot, which starts negating comfort of holding that in your hands and reading.
Which is to say I'm validating your design and thinking here. Watching with interest.
Now I am imagining a retro-Mac-like computer (after all, Macs started at 1 bit per pixel) with a vertical page display.
As for greyscale, with enough pixels, you can do dithering quite well. We used to do that with laser and ink-jet printers (by playing with reticule in PostScript, because the default was not definitely NOT designed for 300 dpi) with decent results.
In fact, a step back into monochrome could be a huge opportunity to explore new ideas in UI.
There is also PineNotes (which is in very early dev stage, but Pine64 makes dev board anyway, already available for ordering) in the market, but from the demo Modos definitely have a lot better display.
Maybe it's finally a time for x86 e-ink laptop to strive. Can't wait to take note on that.
A lot of the people I've spoken to who are interested in E Ink due to having a physical condition that makes it so they can't use a monitor for extended periods. I've also had people report that they experience challenges focusing on a given task. Others want to use their devices outside or have a minimal, focused computing experience.
My perspective has changed recently, and I see it more as a question of accessibility and having control over our devices, user interfaces, and the medium.
No condition, but I just like looking at e-ink, it's so much better. You may not notice but it's tiring to have squares shining in your face all the time...
I find them a lot nicer to read, they have lower power requirements and work wonderfully when it's bright.
I have an e-ink notebook and it's fantastic to take notes with, and I rarely think about charging it.
I'm planning to make a passive display showing things for the day near the front door with an inky frame, I messed with kindles for too long and realised I should just buy the right hardware and make the thing. I think the lack of a backlight makes them very nice for passive, low-attention displays. Glowing things are big "LOOK AT ME" visual distractors. The display should be battery powered for a significant time between charging. Weeks/maybe months?
I would really love to have an e-ink based smart home monitor and dynamic switches. That would be a game changer for me. At night my current setup blinds me for a few seconds, even on the lowest setting which is barley readible at daylight.
Never had an issue with my old palm and it's passive background light.
Relatively static text and certain graphics work best, and e-ink truly is the best option for these in many cases.
With e-ink, persistence is free, pixels are cheap, paints are slow, colour is (mostly) nonexistent, and the more ambient light the better.
Paginated-navigation (whole screen changes in one go), line-art, and dithered or halftoned images work relatively well.
Display power consumption is minimised so long as paints are small and/or infrequent, and it's possible for a small device to go days or even weeks between charges, though that implies reading-based use only, lights, radios (WiFi, Bluetooth), and speakers off. I find that Web browsing drains battery at roughly 10x the rate of ebook reading.
Text is beautifully crisp, approaching laserprinter quality (~200--300 dpi).
It works well for reasonably static content, whether that's a single image that remains in place for hours, days, weeks, months, years (possible with no further power), or something that tends to paint the whole screen at a time, possibly modifying a small region (e.g., a page of text whilst typing).
It's possible to do shaded images, animation, and videos, but you've got to work carefully around contrast for colour-differentiated graphics ("grey goop" isn't an existential threat, but it is a visual menace), and the trade-offs between display quality and refresh speed are fairly significant. E-ink can drive 15 Hz refresh, but that comes with ghosting and display artefacts on my Onyx BOOX (X-Mode).
At the highest quality modes, scrolling is a hot mess, and the screen dissolves into what I call "pixel soup". The worst part of this is that it's then hard to tell how far you've scrolled and to reacquire your reading or focus point when you stop. The compromise is to use high-quality when the display is static and Speed Mode (these refer to specific E-Ink display modes) as the image is updating, there's a hybrid mode which offers this. (In practice, you'll set apps that require scroll to this mode and the issue largely goes away.)
Effects which are acceptable on emissive colour displays, such as shadings, gradients, background colours, and lower-contrast or colour-differentiated text and background often fail spectacularly on e-ink. A constant frustration is graphics or visuals which use colours to differentiate data. Um, "this grey means A and this identical shade of grey means B" ... doesn't really work. If your graphics don't work when printed B&W on paper, they probably won't work on e-ink.
My Onyx offers 16 shades of greyscale, and there may be some slight differentiation, but an alternative means of differentiating data would be better. All those early Lotus 123 and Excel chart value shadings and datapoint characters suddenly make a lot of sense again.
What e-ink excels at is of course reading static, formatted, B&W / greyscale-focused documents with an emphasis on line-art or well-rendered halftone / dithered images. Those are crisp, clear, readable under any lighting conditions, and can be read even with the display or device powered off. Text-based generative tools (e.g., editors, Linux shell) work quite well.
Quite good: Notetaking, B&W/greyscale painting or drawing, audio playback (podcasts, music), voice comms (generally w/ third-party apps such as Jitsi Meet or other conferencing / voice / audio chat apps), Web browsing (so long as colour and animation aren't key).
Not so much: gaming, photography, video, high-fidelity / colour images.
I have a portable monitor that is very useful when I'm teaching while traveling.
I've often thought that an e ink monitor would be a nice forcing function for productivity. Similar to how a Kindle forces me to read rather than get distracted by other apps.
doesn't it seem a bit strange that you have to construct your own differences? I've always wondered why there isn't a video interface that just sends compressed deltas. the number of devices that need to actually scan is pretty small at this point.
Comparably sized and specced tablets and monitors tend to run ~US$800-$1000 currently (Onyx Tab X, Onyx Mira, both 13.3"). The much larger Mira Pro is closer to $1800 (25.3" diagonal).
I'd expect something comparable to the 13.3" Onyx products as displays seem to dominate the BOM costs.
They're "open hardware", but it's not immediately clear what the panel is. Only a small number of repos in their github and the only e-ink-looking repo is called Glider.
It took me a good 5 minutes now to find that EPDC most likely stands for "Electrophoretic Display Controller" (having found no explanation of this on either your site or the github code). Seeing that you guys use this acronym a lot, you might want to fully spell it out somewhere.
But anyway, thanks for the awesome work you're doing!
