Slashdot Mirror
DIY Electronic Paper Display
An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices.com has an article about a development kit for prototyping device displays based on electronic paper technology. The kit includes a 170dpi, 6-inch (diagonal) SVGA (800 x 600) EPD (electronic paper display) module supporting four shades of gray, and a small computer module that runs the display. EPDs provide bright, high-contrast, thin, lightweight displays that remain legible under 'any lighting condition' -- much like newsprint. Once an image has been 'printed,' no power is needed to hold it."
At the moment, I wouldn't rush out to build this. What I am doing, is waiting for somebody in the community to make it, break it, fiddle with it and make it better and higher res. I'd really like to see contributions to E-Ink and the other digital paper methods come from the online community, and I'd really like to see myself using this technology too.
What comes to my mind is placing the paper in an 'in' tray and having it have the next item of business printed onto it.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
What you are missing is that it's a niche product that has some useful applications. Stores could use them as signage on pricetags, and not ever have to worry about the extremely laborius task of relabeling everything on a price change. Hook these up via (extremely secure) Wi-Fi and prices can be changed at the press of the button.
Once they get color figured out, you can use them as an actual digital picture frame. The probelm with most digital frames today is the battery is constantly driving the display, so it must be plugged in or maintained. If you are only using power on changes, you can have a picture frame that changes every few minutes or hour, and the battery would last quite some time.
-- I have fans? Wow.
Sad to say, I suspect that they don't care in the least about hobbyists. They want to sell to PDA/ebook/mobile phone manufacturers. They would hope to sell a couple of hundred to this market in the hope that one of their customers will make a popular product and order several thousand of the screen (without the devkit) later on.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
3,000 for a DEV BOARD?
I would think so, considering there's no infrastructure in place to mass-manufacture these things for low cost, hence there's a very limited number of them in the world at the moment. The price will remain obscene until the R&D department is paid off no doubt.
Shitty resolution or not, I think this epaper hooked up to phone concept has serious potential, and I doubt these types of things will be rare 10 years from now.
This is the PDA every linux user (or maybe just me) has ever wanted. High rez, low power consuption, nice size, simple CPU. Open API. Who cares if it only has 4 levels of gray, that's all you need if your planning on doing work.
And these people think they need to sell it as a dev kit? It's a product already, just give it a shell.
On the other hand... $3000? Is that Canadian money?
I would rather be ashes than dust!
I'd hardly call it a "DIY" kit at a cost of $3,000. And it's not shipping for at least another month. And judging by thier screenshots, even simple fonts look fairly crappy at this resolution and only 4-level grayscale. If it were $150 I'd consider it for a home project. If it were $1,000 for the devkit with a promised volume price of under $100, I might consider developing a product with it, if I already had a great idea that I was fairly confident of. But for $3,000, who's buying this first-gen technology devkit with unknown technological future and unknown (but probably high given the devkit cost) pricing?
11*43+456^2
Yeah, $3000 for a Dev board.
And no doubt, the production Ebooks out there are pretty darn expensive too, and will be for a couple years.
But hell, if you want to slap together a startup, and have a small, dedicated team work on this sort of technology for a couple years, building and field testing some supercool apps, and learning _now_ how to harness the idiosyncrasies of the hardware, $3000 a pop is cheap.
Of course, if you're serious about a startup, you'd probly go out and get your own gumstix.
Or if you're a serious nerd, $3000 is nothing. Hell, how much did a Black Apple cost, adjusted for inflation?
$3000 for a 800x600 B/W screen (four levels of gray)
Takes me back about 25 years.
Fair enough that it is new technology - but I guess this is for lab testing only. Unless you are a real early adopter nut!
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>the fact that it is only monochrome will keep me from
>trying the experiment any time soon
i take issue with this, the pda i use has a 16 grade monochrome screen. good design means that the UI has a good balance of contrast to keep it legible. what exactly precisely is "color" an "absolute requirement" for when you are organising/emailing/word processing/bloggind or slashdotting? non IMO. google needs no color, as does pretty much every website i use. it's just decoration. this display tech isnt good enough yet for real time rendering of movies so that goes out of the window. sure once we're a few years down the line and eink-ebooks become a reality then graphic novels (comics) and glossy magazines would probably very much like color but hey, >90% of current dead tree newspaper pages have been grayscale for ever and i expect there arent great swathes of people *not* buying them because the graphics are crap.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
As usual, Slashdot manages to link to a vaguely interesting article and be completely incorrect and misleading in the title and summary.
This is *not* intended to be built by you, the hobbyist -- it is no "DIY" kit.
This is intended for people like Sony who want to be selling products based on this in a year or so. For them, $3k is more than reasonable, and not particularly out of line with the dev kits for many more mundane systems.
What is cool about this from the Slashdot reader's standpoint is that:
(a) It runs Linux. Linux is becoming dominant in the embedded world. Why not? It's flexible, there are no licensing fees, it's quite powerful, it's very well tested, and there is a huge pool of application developers available to hire from when you need to write your apps. The only drawback over a custom OS is memory usage -- but, hell, memory is getting cheaper every day, and for a high-end embedded device, it's not a big chunk of the cost.
(b) With any luck, it means that companies will start shipping e-paper products within two years or so. The last crop of "ebook readers" pretty much failed, which I think is too bad -- too expensive, and people didn't like the DRM. Perhaps the lower battery requirements of e-paper will make it feasible.
(c) The display drivers are open source. The concept of making drivers open source, the idea that it's valuable to avoid being stuck with hardware in your product that has NDA requirements, may be spreading. Maybe not. It still makes me hopeful.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Welcome to the real world, where you actually have to spend money on cutting edge technology. $3000 sounds cheap for a company that's actually going to make a product. Certainly, if we had a product that needed eInk, we'd pay the expense without hesitation.
What's that? You're _not_ making a product, and you just want to screw around with it? Well, guess what? They're looking to stay in business, and you don't do that by selling way under cost to a bunch of guys who are never going to deliver those huge-quantity orders that eInk needs to stay in business. You do it by selling to people who are actually going to make a product out of it.
As for a "more reasonable dev board", they're using a Gumstix, which is an off-the-shelf component. It should be pretty obvious to anyone with half a brain that the majority of the costs here are either in the display or the R&D.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
The point is that reading text in notepad or from a pdf file should NOT require my laptop to be plugging along, wasting precious battery life on ubiquitous yet completely unimportant colors and movement. It's text. E-paper will open up a VAST new range of functionality, AND people seem to be forgetting that it is viewable from all angles, can (eventually) be rolled or scrolled up when not in use, and (perhaps most importantly) combats the horrible eyestrain that comes from attempting to read a full-text novel on an lcd screen. This is basically solid-state text, a book that's only one page long yet contains all the works of Tolstoy. Haven't you been lusting for this forever? Its the future, people! How long before these things are equipped with Wi-Fi, and can download the day's New York Times automatically and without the environmental and industrial cost of millions of wasted sheets of paper? How long before you're checking your email in a format that's actually READABLE at small screen sizes? How long before e-paper ASCII porn becomes the bee's knees? :P
Also, its important to note that in those other towering industrial countries (ahem, you know, OUTSIDE of the US, where we got so much of our tech to begin with), small one-application devices are MUCH more common than full-out computers for the user-on-the-go. Considering that our cell phones can do basically anything BUT display readable text, having a device that can fill that gap is beautiful. And speaking of cell phones, I'd gladly go to a monochrome e-paper display for a phone that would last me 50hrs on a charged battery...while you're clapping all 'special-needs' at your 16-kajillion color screen for the first 5 hours of the road trip, I'll be functional till we're back home. All of this goes to combat the rediculous bass-ackwards element of high-end technology - that the simple things are many times as difficult and power-consuming as the complex.
We look at technology right now in terms of best and brightest. But e-paper is a tremendous step towards what technology WILL be - an integrated, scalable, and subtle extension of our biological lives. I have NO doubt that we've got a humanistic renaissance coming up in a few years here, and we'll look back on widescreen displays and "gotta-have-it" superficial devices in the same way we shake our heads at the oily, pastelled veneer of the 80's. When technology TRULY becomes a part of our lives, when function overtakes form, wasting timeenergymoney so that we can watch Scary Movie between classes is going to seem pretty sophomoric, yes?