Products like these make me realize that a standard e-reader has the perfect general purpose e-ink display. The Kindle for example is about the same size as this but much sleeker, is backlit, multi-tone, has a battery, wifi, bluetooth, all for less than half the price. I wish there were more mainstream jailbreaking projects and alternative operating systems to really unlock their potential.
Also consider that the devices you mention are probably heavily subsidised.
The kindle is a gateway drug into the rest of the Amazon ecosystem, and you probably need some form of subscription to get full use out of it, or at the least you need to buy ebooks on Amazon for it.
The $90 phone probably comes with facebook and other social apps + bloatware pre-installed, that no doubt ended up there because of some commercial deal.
Outside a handful of providers (Amazon, Barn & Noble's Nook, possibly Kobo), e-ink devices tend to not be subsidised.
You can look at pricing for, e.g., Onyx's product line to get a good sense of what the cost of a given mass-market device at a given e-ink size (and capabilities, e.g., Wacom, frontlight, touch interface) are.
Smaller e-ink devices are quite affordable. At 10" and above, you start seeing a pretty significant price premium, though IMO the benefits are worth it.
The (eink) kindle is a fabulous device and in absolutely no way requires you to buy ebooks from Amazon. you can just plug it in and put Mobi files on it.
The convenience factor of the BezosBazaar can't be underestimated. I have no interest in maintaining a digital library these days, and the walls of the Kindle garden just aren't that impactful when you read maybe a dozen books a year.
Amazon also gives you an @kindle.com address you can email documents to (epub, pdf, docx, plain text…) and they’ll show up seconds later on your kindle.
I dont have the link handy, but there's a company that sells 6-8 inch eink screens that are just recycled kindle parts with a more hobbyist-friendly interface attached
I think so! Unfortunately they're actually more expensive than buying a Kindle, but I guess that's the price you pay for something that's conviently hackable
The main reason there isn't is because e-ink tech is controlled by a company with a strict and expensive licensing arrangement. Until the patent expires, we're unlikely to realize the technology's full potential.
This is a myth, endlessly repeated without a source. Not only have the original patents expired, but there's a competing tech called Display Electronic Slurry (DES, or the cofferdam tech).
The real reason e-ink hasn't seen much innovation is that it's a tiny niche market, because e-ink is useful for e-readers and not much else. In contrast, LCDs are produced at a rate of billions per quarter, which gives room for lots of companies to compete furiously.
You're comparing a product from one of the largest companies on earth with an upstart. and even the cheapest ad-supported Kindle is only 2/3 the price of this in US?
The cheapest Kindle is routinely on sale for $60-70. And spec wise there is really no comparison. The Kindle has a backlight. 1448x1072 resolution (compared to this one's 800x480). Battery that can last a month. USB-C. 16GB storage. Bluetooth. It's a very capable device. The fact that this one is made by an "upstart" means nothing. You have to compete on price and quality to be successful. Plus if this company goes out of business and shuts their servers you are left with a $150 paperweight.
Anyway yes the Kindle has better spec but as you mentionned in your first post the fact that it's locked is the whole point. Amazon is not making money on the device ...
Keepa doesn’t always tell the whole story as it can’t track coupons and in-cart discounts, which Amazon regularly uses especially for their own products to hide the real lowest price from price trackers and scrapers.
The largest company you mentioned outsourced the manufacture to factories like Foxconn. A common pattern of those "upstart" is they are just a different thin wrapper around some other factories, with a crappier spec but able to sell the BOM with higher prices.
Old Kobos were awesome, I had one for years running Kohreader. Sadly I lost it. Then when I researched new Kobos, about two years ago, it seemed like the quality has gone down a lot as the company has been sold several times. Is that still the case?
I use a Kobo Libra 2 and I find it great. It replaced my Paperwhite. It's easy enough to side load apps if you want too (but I find that I don't - I just need it to read books and it does that well)
I have two Clara HD and they’re pretty good. They just work. I use Calibre with them.
Inside is a micro SD card so if I ever need more storage I can just clone the original SD and extend the partition to upgrade the storage.
The Kobo are so much better than the kindle imho: more open, not locked down, and the typesetting engine is Mike’s ahead: no ragged edges or page long rivers unlike I was getting on the kindle.
I picked up a Libra H2O a while back, I've had no issues whatsoever. I used the default software without issue before discovering KOReader, installation was easy. The hardware is very solid, have not noticed any problems with the outside casing, screen, or issues related to power.
I bought one of these for my house recently and it’s been great. We wrote custom software for our own info display, straightforward since you just serve images over an HTTP endpoint. I’m sure there are cheaper ways to achieve this result but it’s nice to have a prebuilt package like this. My only complaint is that the custom software requires using a proxy server managed by the device creator which is bad for longevity, hope that changes eventually.
Why wouldn't you just buy a used kindle touch? Once rooted, it runs python3, curl, and imagemagick, I use it to query the Canadian weather API and display the forecast. No proxies needed! Plus it only costs $40 used... Essentially a local-device version of my earlier attempt at an e-paper weather display: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oel08SDFyIY
If there's enough interest I can release a new video.
Please do release a new video! There’s a comment thread about “it’s a pity kindles don’t seem to get jailbroken” so presumably some people are confused (me included)
Yea, the video is 7(!) years old, Amazon regularly patches jailbreaks just like Apple does, and for certain fire tablets it’s apparently impossible to jailbreak fully at all for the last 2 years. So you either need to find one that didn’t get the OTA update or find some way to downgrade to a previous OS/bootloader.
While I love the idea of this, I can't justify the effort and time required to get it to work versus just using a tablet, or even a normal display connected to a home server. If you want a less shiny display you can get matte screen covers, or even just de-saturate the colors in the settings.
It might take a few years to refine the manufacturing process in other factories under different management. There is certainly a lot of knowledge and equipment to replicate.
To make a modern comparison, the first mass-market device with USB-C was arguably the 2015 MacBook, it was only really last year 2022 that it finally started to feel like most consumer electronics were being released with usb-c instead of micro-usb, and still many devices today are being manufactured with micro-usb ports (I even have a device I bought this year that utilized… mini-usb!!) so that’s 7+ years for something that everyone agrees is superior to gain serious traction. 3D printers are similar, after the patents expired, it took nearly 10 years for them to be truly mainstream.
I love e-ink displays, and I wish there would be more options out there for creartive use, like this one by Invisible Screen (hello Konschubert, thanks for creating this!)
What I'd love is a large, high-res, perhaps color, e-ink display that I can use either as a second screen, or as an indipendent computer. I read hours every day on an LCD screen, and most of that reading would be much better on an e-ink.
I'd like a version of Firefox's Reader Mode where it instead sends the text to an e-ink display. Remotely to a Kindle could work, or locally to an attached e-ink monitor.
What I'm wondering is how open the device is for being operated entirely locally. I want to make sure I can still operate it myself so that I don't have to generate e-waste when it becomes "obsolete" by the maker.
Otherwise the form factor is really good-looking and I'd put this in my kitchen.
The device in the article is not compatible with Visionect, but Visionect does offer digital signage devices (with even 13", 32" or even 42" e-ink displays). The prices of these devices are a bit premium but you get what you pay for.
E-Ink prices for large displays are still too far high. Not much improvement in the last year. Little watch-sized ones are only a few dollars, though. Ought to be good for something. Auto gauges? Status displays on low-power devices?
Gauges are one instance where e-ink's principle characteristic, persistence, might actually be a strong drawback.
For an instrument dashboard, you're better with an active display whose failure mode is to not display any information (or some nominal low/nil response) rather than continue to show the last updated value through all eternity.
That last would be particularly bad for speed, fuel, or battery-status displays, say.
Thank you, this is exactly the information I was looking for.
If it would be a nicely built frame with a display and a microcontroller (flashable with a custom firmware, or with a simple and sane local API where I can upload a full bitmap via USB and/or WiFi, with no cloud requirements) I'd buy this in an instant.
I have a Waveshare 7.5" display for some Grafana dashboards, but I'm all thumbs when it comes to building a physical case for it, so the circuit board just dangles on a wire in an ugly cardboard box.
A shame, indeed. I have no use for a display that can't even show what I want (or needs a third-party service and Internet connectivity for this). I guess, it's most likely hackable if the case can be opened, but I'm not exactly willing to fight it for $150.
I love eink. It’s so underused, especially in the home setting, where it can be a real asset as a calm technology. I think it could be a good passive screen for young kids as it’s not a traditional “screen” yet can still communicate information.
Nice job, creator. I was working on starting up something similar, went through 3 prototypes but never finished it :(
A few ideas for your consideration:
- 7 inch is waaaay too small, should be at least 10/11 inch.
- Touchscreen is a must. To switch between views, scroll to next/previous day/week, and even insert/update events.
- Voice control is really nice to have, eg to read back events for today/this week etc. Maybe to wake up so that the screen does not stay on all the time.
- Would be cool to have it running off internal power source. I used LCDs which are power-hungry, but with e-paper you are constrained only by the controller which I think is much less draining (voice control would not be an option in this case I think).
- Consider offline mode. Yes it does introduce difficulties but allows people to own the data instead of renting it and sharing with others.
The lack of a battery kills this for me. Minimal power usage is one of the benefits of these kinds of displays, so it seems a very strange omission. We have too many cords running along walls as it is, and it makes the placement a lot harder.
I got into arduino when they first come out because I wanted to build information radiators. Every five years since I look at whether or when it will be possible to hang a picture frame on the wall that has no wires and updates. I’m just about overdue to look again. It seems like we are close, but charging it wirelessly or off of solar hidden in the frame is a while yet.
The desktop model really stands out here. The foot needs to be heavy, and there’s plenty of space for batteries in there.
While what could well be the panel used in this is cheaper[1], there's obviously consideration due regarding whatever device is driving the panel, making the frame/mount, and coding the software to drive it, etc.
You may be able to get a larger panel for the same sort of price[2], but there's something to be said for having a finished product that's fundamentally plug-and-play... which is arguably a different market to a "buy the components and make one yourself" crowd.
I have a similar thing running using a Zero WH and Inkycal. The screen I have is the same size (7.5 inches) but you can use bigger ones too. I didn’t want to shell out more money initially for a larger screen, but I may upgrade it later.
In some ways, it's actually way less limiting than any other SDK. You can directly control every pixel it displays, which is pretty freeing. I like that idea a lot, but I don't like that it's proxied through their server :-(
I am going to have new pictures taken anyways, I will try to make sure to add some size references.
There are a bunch of photos here. Which ones would you say are the most suggestive of a bigger screen size? I can maybe re-sort the images to prevent confusion.
Last thing I want is a customer ordering something, them being unhappy and me having to process a return. That's always a loss for me.
It's definitely a fair price. Just a shame it is closed source and not battery powered. The Inkplate series of displays are better on both fronts (open source and support batteries). The downside is you'd need to make a nice wooden case, and do some programming.
Using the most-recently-active application (or book) as the sleep / poweroff screen is a feature of many e-book readers. If not Kindle, then Onyx's BOOX line, and from what I've seen elsewhere, others.
Front page of a paper: any e-ink tablet with a PDF viewer or web browser will get you there.
I would pay good money for a tabloid eink reader, so 17x11 inches. Ideally it would fold. A folding pair of 8.5x11 screens designed to work together would fit my use case too. So far as I know, nobody makes such a thing. Ideally it would be color but I’d settle for monochrome.
I purchased one of these after seeing it posted to hn a few weeks ago. Very happy with it. Super easy to setup and just works. Maker has clearly put loads of work into refining the experience.
I was looking for something like this. But the API looks not so good. I always dreamed of something like this that has an API where I can send html to render and completely locally.
I don’t really understand how it is still trendy to pretend that everyone uses Google for email and calendar.
I get that the SF crowd was all about it, but if the last few years have taught us anything it is that there’s more to the techie world than VC free money startups.
I reckon there are far more people who need this and who might buy this who are using Outlook/Office 365 either alone or in some combination than who use Gmail exclusively.
And yes, Office 365 has an API. Even Alexa works with it.
I’d imagine the creator uses Google calendar, made it for themself, and then decided others might like to have a pre-built version. “Trendy” probably doesn’t have anything to do with it.
Is it necessary to have the content proxied through your API server? If the company doesn't work out, it would be a shame to have this device stop working, even though it's fully capable of reaching the internal URL I would be hosting my content on.
Yes, that could be changed, but it's a bit of a hassle to implement with the bluetooth and and storing state on an embedded device. So I haven't implemented it yet and I can't promise if and when it's coming.
If I am not hit by a metaphoric truck, I give my best to make sure not to disappoint my customers. My plan is to keep the backend running for 10 years after I sell the last display.
But of course that's just a plan und I understand that you may not like the odds. That's totally reasonable.
No offense to you, but this comment sounds like one of those customers that are never going to use your thing, even if you implement all that.
Find the people who want to use a product despite all the lacking features, because the one thing it does is exactly what they need, and build on that.
They have customizable dashboards. What I'm really looking for is something I can use as a sort of command center in a few places in my house. It allows me to control the things I care about, shows my upcoming schedule, and whatever else is relevant. By my work desk, the #1 thing I care about is upcoming meetings. Other places, I care about other things.
Critically, though, I don't want it to glow. I want it either e-ink or purely reflective LCD.
This is probably a few devices. Ideally, there'd be small / cheap ones with mechanical switches and a tiny screen to replace my light switches, and big ones for my living room, work room, etc.
I think the trick would be to start with something, so one doesn't have an infinite engineering task, and so there are ready frameworks for modularity. Either Home Assistant or dash would be decent starting points, depending on which direction this took.
But yeah, now that I mention it, I have a vision in my head for what I want (which I would buy). Retrokludged features without the same vision would probably not get us there.
So I'll cut this back to what everyone else is saying: Calendar flexibility. This needs to sync with home, work, and other calendars, so at the very least, Outlook.
Yes, but, as you say, reimplementing Home Assistant wouldn't really be that valuable. What you might want is a (very dumb) e-ink display with a touch panel, which can maybe display an image and register touches. Then, that can interface with Home Assistant to make touch panels. That would be much more manageable as a project, and very useful. Bonus points for physical buttons.
My experience is that 90% of the work on these projects is integration: getting the toolchain working, and all the pieces talking. If there were an easy-to-use digitizer and a documented toolchain, I'd buy a LilyGo T5 right now.
Without that, I suspect I'll never get around to making one work, and I'm not buying another half-started project.
As a footnote, 50% of the remaining work is on the stupid stuff like cases and power supplies. I'm glad you did that. But if you ever sell this as a device, consider provide a variety of cases for different use-cases (desk stand, wall mount, metal box with room for other stuff, etc.) and your sales will double.
As a footnote, I like when devices are compatible with something standard, like a Micro:bit or a Circuit Playground. That guarantees a basic working toolchain for at least getting code on, as well as a support ecosystem.
Home assistant is still a dream to come true in terms of where I want to go with the product. And home-assistant.io may be a good starting point.
I'll save that link ...
Regarding calendar: You can already connect as many google calendars and as many .ics sources as you want. If you can create an .ics link from outlook that's supported. (At least on iOS, the Android update is still being worked on. Did you know about Jetpack Compose? I didn't...)
Of course, Outlook support would be nice. It's on the roadmap. But as always, I don't want to promise things that haven't happened yet.
There isn't a single thing I made more than 15 years ago in my house which:
(a) required an operating system
(b) still works
It all bitrots to hell. For comparison, everything I've made on a PIC, Atmel, ESP, etc. continues working.
FPGAs have a more mixed track record; the devices work, but they're unmaintainable (the dev toolchains require e.g. Windows NT and some activation server which no longer exists).
Things I've made out of wood, metal, and similar materials work too, as do PCBs I designed with analog.
My point is I want a piece of hardware and not a computer.
I'd wager that far more individuals use GMail and Google calendar and a majority of business users use O365/Outlook. This looks more like a home device than a business device.
No. I messed up with some time ago, as far as i remember, calendar subscription gives you a caldav:// URL (maybe webdav or something I don't remember). This is somewhat a industry standard. Replace caldav with https and you can GET the .ics file of the entire calendar.
Office 365 has an API, but good luck convincing your organization to approve your app that works with this API.
I tried with 2-2 different companies that I worked with, but to no avail.
I just wanted a simple app that syncs some events from the work calendar to my personal one...
That's true. I had a touch display for a pi laying around and started a personal dashboard project. Thought about Google calendar to synchronize the calendar between different devices... It was too much of a hassle.
I ended up serving my own caldav server on the pi and everyone's device could easily synch the calendar, no matter if PC, iPhone or Android phone. No need for Google
There are plenty of ways! I can personally whole-heartedly recommend Fastmail if you don't mind paying a bit for your email (and I believe that something as important as email is worth paying for).
There are two aspects that make this easier than most people realize:
- You will theoretically retain your existing Gmail address forever, even if you close your Gmail account. This means you can reactivate it at any time.
- You can use your new email address as the sign-in ID for your existing Google account. This means you can continue to use Google Docs, YouTube, etc and stuff without being reliant on Gmail.
For email, it's straightforward but a bit tedious. There are a number of ways to break it into smaller steps. Any approach should include getting your own domain name.
Smoking, lottery tickets, and drugs cause negative effects in people's lives.
Using gmail has caused me no negative effects. It may not be ideal, but it works and has a reasonable set of tradeoffs.
I think it's more like renting vs buying or building from source vs compiled binaries than it is a crippling substance addiction which will ruin your health and relationships.
I wouldn't put it that strongly, but I tend to agree.
With the amount of almost daily news/leaks/... it should be a no brainer to not use these advertising platforms made by advertising companies IF you are tech savvy. It is hard for others as they have to give up some convenience.
And to the person calling you 'sad', I find it hard not to be when people react that way.
I'm using Office 365 myself, because I hate google's datamining but Microsoft isn't much better. The added benefit for me is that I work with M365 at work and having an unrestricted tenant for myself helps me understand it better (to see the options available that I don't have access to in the admin console at work).
But I don't know what else I'd use. I don't like proton very much as a company either (purely personal opinion), and I don't know anyone else that has good mobile syncing.
