I hack electronics as a hobby, and I'm am constantly amazed by the incredible prices of even the simplest screens. I can buy a Nexus 7 that includes a CPU, RAM, video card, SSD, wifi, a battery, and a 7" touchscreen for the same price I can buy a 5.6" non-touch screen at 720p [1]. And no, that doesn't include the battery or any of the tablet hardware. That's just the screen.
There's literally no reason why displays need to be as expensive as they are when a normal person wants to buy them, seeing as how Apple and Google et al have no problem sourcing them for much, much, MUCH less.
Not sure about that. Perhaps not sold at a loss in terms of bill of materials right now (since they have been in production for some time they probably brought the price down), but that doesn't account for the labor costs (developers, support, etc...).
All e-book readers are subsuidized by book sales. Amazon would be mad not to do it that way. They are a goods company not a hardware company.
Kudos to the web folks at visionext-epaper! The site looks superb and functions perfectly for me despite the fact that I have not enabled javascript for the domain. I can not remember the last time I saw a site that looked and worked so well without requiring javascript.
A particulate sensor can be used to cheaply monitor the appropriate size range for pollen. Of course, it just senses light scattering, so other air polluting particulates of a similar size will be indistinguishable. Large particulates greater than 10 - 100 microns in diameter are likely to be pollen in an outdoor environment, but they can also be combustion related particulates. More information can be obtained from sensors that measure light polarization, which may allow one to differentiate pollen from other particulates of similar size.
Depends on what you call 'reasonable', but the answer is likely 'no'. The 'Air Quality Egg' was a kickstarter project a year and a half ago, but they failed to produce a calibrated device. Measuring particles is doable, it's the calibration that is the issue. Most of these sensors don't show useful measures for air pollution, although most claim they do.
