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Hacking Esquire's E-ink Cover
ptorrone writes "I picked up the Esquire E-inked cover today and took a bunch of high res photos, for the makers out there. It has a programming header, 5-pin ISP, a Microchip PIC 12f629 which is flash programmable, 8 pin, 6 lithium coin cell CR2016s, 3 volts each. Two E-ink screens with flex connections — looks like it was made to be reprogrammed and different screens. The top screen has 11 segments, the bottom has 3. It was designed 2008-06-04. The PCB was made by Forewin, half thickness, 2 layer board (FR4). I think someone out there will likely reflash the PIC and make the segments go on / off at different times and perhaps put other displays on it, there's a little bit of hacking to be had but not that much really."
Yes this first feeble attempt is fairly lame, a few segments that will burn out in a couple of months and took a fair investment in hardware to pull off. But it won't end here.
Soon they will put solar collectors on the things to keep it going indefinately, add more segments, etc. Hell, it won't be a generation before they are printing complex enough circuits on the damned things that they will be doing full motion video. On cereal boxes. Or having generic advertising, think shopping carts, seatbacks, etc updating their ad copy over slow radio links. And they already know how to make flat paper speakers so they damned things will be talking whenever somebody is in range.
Democrat delenda est
It would be nice if the post office or local libraries did this. I don't want to go to best buy or radio shack to drop off batteries but I will walk to the library/post office to do so.
A pixel is just a very small, very square segment. I believe what the grandparent poster is trying to say is that this particular e-ink display is heavily segment based, and proposition supported by how it is being used in the cover and how cheap it is to make.
The cheap calculator displays are mostly LCD, which power both high end pixel-driven displays and the videogames that come free with your Happy Meal. This particular implementation of the technology appears to fall to the latter.
Hence, it would be nearly impossible to display anything other than what is currently on the cover without rebuilding the e-ink sheet. In this particular case, we're all winners.
The ______ Agenda
Sorry, but you're wrong. It was all Canadians at that store! (And, to be fair, it was only the manager that approved.)
Most likely what would usually be a matrix able to address individual capsules is setup to turn on several of them at once in the wiring. This is the only explanation I can find for the low number of pins in what is normally a matrix display with many driver ICs attached directly before going to a controlling device such as the PIC here.
Instead what we have here is a very low pin count going directly to a shift register controlled by the pic.
So it's unfortunately obvious from the pictures that no more can be done with the display here. I am, however, interested in reusing the boards for things like fun little robots.
"six CR2016"
How much did the magazine cost? It may have been worth the price just to get those batteries.
http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2062103&cp=&kw=CR2016&parentPage=search
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad