Yes, this is one of the areas I’m most excited about; it makes e-ink more practical for everyday use and opens the space for experimentation. In the long run, as the community grows and more people get involved, we’ll see even more possibilities.
Yes, that’s the mental model I’ve been working from. Variable refresh tied to user input makes a lot of sense: short bursts of speed for navigation or editing, then settling into a low-power static state.
Part of the challenge is deciding what belongs in hardware and what should sit higher up in the OS or software stack.
Hopefully, as more people get the kits and the community grows, we’ll be able to think through these questions together and explore where the right balance between hardware and software should be.
- Making the project open allows people to reuse displays they already own.
- Others can contribute and build on what’s been created.
- Open source firmware, documentation, and the driver board make development more accessible and help remove barriers that previously slowed community projects.
- It’s designed to work with a variety of electrophoretic panels, not only those from E Ink.
In the long run, this openness will strengthen the ecosystem, making it easier for new ideas to take shape and spread.
Back in the days when OLED screens didn’t exist, the rule was that white on black text needs to be bolder for legibility. Since super high contrast is now par for the course, designers with high end devices forgot about this.
I agree that the dark mode on the boox is terrible (I find for example obsidian absolutely unusable). But this could be easily fixed with bolder fonts.
For dynamic content, a higher refresh rate absolutely will lower an eink panel's lifespan. As the refresh rate increases, more of the underlying content's changes will be captured and more pixels will change state.
Thanks. That article seems to have the quote I was looking for.
> E-ink screens are quite power hungry when it comes to peak current. Modern high-resolution panels can consume >20 W peak.
This is where I was wondering and yeah, 20+W is pretty hefty to support a relatively small 8" EInk screen or something.
All those updates cost all that power as long as updates are occurring. Maybe you can optimize many of them away (if some parts of the screen don't move, especially if software was rewritten to optimize for the display).
More importantly, it sounds like you've created a full custom FPGA controller over the voltages that go into an EInk display? That's impressive in its own right even if I don't think 75Hz is a good idea lol.
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FPGA or Full Blown Microprocessor are the only choices here. A high power SIMD/NEON arm64 probably could do the job, but I think the Spartan6 is a good choice as well and has more obvious and straightforward parallelism (and probably all the pins required to control the screen. Even a big microprocessor won't have as many low latency pins as an FPGA).
> Maybe you can optimize many of them away (if some parts of the screen don't move, especially if software was rewritten to optimize for the display).
Yes, that’s definitely something we want to work toward. As the community grows, we hope to tackle these kinds of optimizations together.
> A high power SIMD/NEON arm64 probably could do the job, but I think the Spartan6 is a good choice as well and has more obvious and straightforward parallelism
Yes, precisely for the reasons you stated. We also talk more about it below:
> “Traditionally, the [e-paper display] controller used a single-state machine to control the entire panel, with only two states: static and updating,” says Modos cofounder Wenting Zhang. “Caster treats each pixel individually rather than as a whole panel, which allows localized control on the pixels.”
So in practice would it ever actually hit 20W unless you're doing something that requires constantly updating the whole screen, like playing a video game or watching a video? Surely updating only a few pixels at a time can't be that power hungry, right?
You guys should do a collab with the framework people. I bet they'd be happy to offer an e-ink screen on their laptops just as an option. I've been waiting on an e-ink option for ages.
