Pixel Qi Introduces a DIY Kit

jones_supa writes "Pixel Qi has just revealed their DIY kit for netbooks, planned to be out near the end of Q2 — sounds like June. This makes it possible to retrofit a screen to one fully readable in direct sunlight. In her blog, Mary Lou Jepsen says: 'It’s only slightly more difficult than changing a lightbulb: it’s basically 6 screws, pulling off a bezel, unconnecting the old screen and plugging this one in. That’s it. It’s a 5 minute operation.' She also talks about the 'laptop hospital,' a service depot started by kids in Africa."

Comments

ignoramus

[martas]

i thought their stuff was only black&white? won't you need some pretty severe UI changes to get something useful out of a netbook like that?

Re:ignoramus

[marcansoft]

It's in B&W without backlighting / in the sunlight. It's in full color with the backlight on and at moderate to low ambient light, and somewhere in between as you reduce the backlight level and increase the abient level. Which is pretty good, considering that most laptop screens are fairly unusable in direct sunlight.

Re:ignoramus

[emj]

It's also better than the old OLPC screen, they posted a graph (image) descrbing that. The blog post can't be read but the image of the graph can.

Re:ignoramus

[SpinyNorman]

Nah - it's full color and fast (good for video). If you use it as a drop in replacement for your existing display then what you're getting is the ability to use your laptop in full sunlight where your current screen would be all washed out.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/the-pixel-qi-display/

A similar link

[lazycam]

A quick google search turned up the same story: http://www.buzzbox.com/news/2010-03-07/Pixel_Qi:Q2/

only slightly more difficult than changing a light

[mtrachtenberg]

Yeah. To change a lightbulb you have to change five screws and a bezel. What's one more screw?

She was joking

[gmuslera]

Now we can begin our own "How many netbook owners does it takes to change a lightbulb" jokes.

Re:As opposed to those of us with regular notebook

[SpinyNorman]

This isn't a generic LCD display - that's not their market.

The big deals with the Pixel Qi display is that:

- It's totally usable in full sunlight
- It's full color and fast (OK for video)
- It has a reflective e-ink mode
- It's low power

It's really geared towards:

1) eBook readers that want color and video support
2) Laptops/netbooks intended to be used outside (which tends to mean smaller form factor)

They use the same production line as traditional LCDs though (there's lots of articles / videos on them if you Google), so they'll certainly be able to produce larger sizes if they want to.

Re:Slashdotted?

[xlotlu]

It's hosted on yahoo servers. That's more than unfortunate... it's sad.

Re:only slightly more difficult than changing a li

[SpinyNorman]

Not much apparently. If a five year old girl can do it, maybe you can too?! ;-)

Just a quick note to say the DIY kits from our distributor will be available towards the end of Q2. We will be announcing with them prior to distrbution. Thanks for your patience.

One of the reasons I'm personally committed to doing this goes back to my One Laptop per Child experience and girls in a poor rural part of Nigeria who helped us test the early beta-laptop builds. In their school they had slanted desks bolted to benches with 4-5 kids per desk/bench combo. When any kid fidgeted or bumped all the laptops would fall on the concrete floors. The laptops were designed to be rugged and didn't break usually, but in this early build one of the cables to the touchpad/keyboard was 1mm too short and could become "unseated". This meant the keyboard and the touchpad would no longer work unless something was done.

Luckily: An 11 year old girl decided to open a laptop hospital. Unfortunately the boys really missed out here, because in this part of Nigeria "everyone knows" only girls work at hospitals, she eventually recruited girls as young as 5 to help out in the hospital. This group of girls armed with screwdrivers starting taking apart the laptops and reseating the cables. Sometimes they'd change out a screen, or a speaker. They learned about the hardware of their laptops. They got to see what was inside. They got better and better at fixing things by learning as they went.

Ministers of Education had a tough time believing that these girls could fix the hardware, so they would visit - to see it with their own eyes - and start thinking differently about maintenance of hardware. We kept preaching that ownership was the best way to assure maintenance.

Yet, most people are scared to change their laptop screen. It's only slightly more difficult than changing a lightbuld: it's basically 6 screws, pulling off a bezel, unconnecting the old screen and plugging this one in. That's it. It's a 5 minute operation.

Re:Slashdotted?

[kimvette]

coral cache

http://pixelqi.com.nyud.net/blog1/2010/03/07/diy-pixel-qi-kits/

what about two screens?

[blackest_k]

If you could manage to mount the new screen to the outside of the netbook with a touch screen mod and switch the connections between the internal and external screen. It might be able to create a netbook/tablet. I know i'd find that useful.

Humanity at its finest:

[Hurricane78]

This group of girls armed with screwdrivers starting taking apart the laptops and reseating the cables. Sometimes they'd change out a screen, or a speaker. They learned about the hardware of their laptops. They got to see what was inside. They got better and better at fixing things by learning as they went.

5-11 years old. Not told by anything to do so but in their own interest. Sorry, but that’s humanity at its finest.
If I learned one thing about our abilities, it’s to simply assume you can do it. I see so many people who say and think that they can’t do this and can’t do that.
We all are incredibly intelligent. Everyone can fix electronics. Everyone can write software. Everyone can learn quantum physics!
It’s just a matter of allowing oneself to assume that one is able to do it. And then do it.
That one rule, worked for me my whole life. :)

Ministers of Education had a tough time believing that these girls could fix the hardware, so they would visit - to see it with their own eyes - and start thinking differently about maintenance of hardware.

And here we see that exact mindset of “we can’t”. Just as most people here would assume a 5 year old girl couldn’t fix a computer. Let alone one from a 3rd world rural area.
Turns out that’s bullshit! :)

Man, if everyone could just see the tiny box of social conditioned pointless rules that he is caught in... “You can’t do that! Only rich good looking men get girls! Obey! Buy, buy, consume and buy! You are ugly! There is another side, that is against you! Believe! You must do this, and must not do that! ... ”

Re:Humanity at its finest:

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to believe everyone can learn quantum physics. That is what I literally said to people.

Then I started tutoring at a community college, and got hit with a big reality bat.

For a lot of these older people, they have an incredibly difficult time remembering to do the same thing to both sides of an equation. And don't even get me started on them figuring out how to manipulate negative numbers for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. *shudder*

The best they can do is try to memorize lists of rules and apply them. Developing an intuition for things is way beyond them now. Not only that, but they never learned how to think for themselves, so they will never teach themselves anything, ever. Which means they require constant hand-holding through every class. Their strategy is essentially to attempt to memorize how to do every possible problem that could be on the exams, instead of just learning the concepts and applying them dynamically.

Sure, maybe if they spent their whole lives using their brain properly, maybe they could learn this stuff now. But I seriously think that their brains just can't handle learning things much at all anymore. They let their minds atrophy and the best they can hope for is holding off dementia.

If you think you can teach them quantum physics, have at it. I'm not stopping you.

The lesson I got from it is that if you want to know how to do stuff, keep your brain active your whole life, and learn things as you go. Your brain can and will, in a way, forget how to learn things, if you don't exercise it regularly.

And this isn't even accounting for the people who have had physical trauma causing brain damage. I've tried to help people like that, one person who actually got real migraines after thinking for over a half hour. On the one hand, I applaud them, because they are trying their best to do what they can to make the best of the situation. On the other hand, it is just sad watching them, because they are never, ever going to do it, without some kind of specialized therapy.

Re:Humanity at its finest:

[cdrguru]

A dirty secret that most educators know is there are people that can manipulate abstract symbols and those that cannot. If you confront someone that cannot do this with a problem that requires it, no matter how hard they try to do it, they aren't going to be able to.

This does not appear to be learned skill but something the brain is either capable of or not.

This used to be pretty unimportant in the grand scheme of things. It became more important around the beginning of the 20th century, but was a pretty simple division - if you didn't have the ability you got a job in a factory or became a plumber or something like that. If you could, you could be a mathemetician. Engineering disciplines were sort of on the line, but probably require the ability.

I don't think it has anywhere near as much to do with age or training. But if someone does not possess the ability, trying to "make them" is futile and frustrating.

Re:Dust?

[^_^x]

All of the laptop screens I've disassembled have included the LCD panel, lighting tube, backlight reflector and diffusor assembly in one main assembly, so it may just be a matter of opening the case around the screen, popping a couple of cables off and swapping it.

Re:What kind of business model do they have?

[icegreentea]

A whole bunch of Pixel Qi running devices were demoed at CES this year. We'll probably never see half of them again, but the rest are all presumably coming out sometime. This shit is friggin NEW. Hasn't really been time to integrate into most laptop lines yet. My bet is that the high-end laptops will start offering this as an option soon enough.

And there are a few downsides. I'm assuming that they are still more expensive than a plain LCD screen. But from what I can remember from the CES videos, there's a distinct yellowish tint to the display (in color/video mode). It was very much as if it was all printed on newsprint. Now, nothing wrong with that for what the screen does, but I cannot see manufacturers pushing out a yellow tinted display across all their lines. There would be... backlash.

Re:Dust?

[bhtooefr]

No, you haven't had to get "into the layers of the LCD" for many, many years. It's a sealed unit, and a commodity one at that. Remove old panel, put new panel in.

Re:Slashdotted?

[bpkiwi]

Only the people who comment don't read the article. This is mostly because of the moderation system - if you stop to read the article then your comment will appear to late to gather any mod points - thus you are lost in the +1 noise. Only by jumping in as soon as you see something posted and saying something pointless, uninformed, and inane will you have a chance of getting moded to +5 by your peers - who also didn't read the article.

Sign me up

[davide marney]

I purchased four XO-1s when they originally came out a couple years ago. I gave away two, boxed one for posterity, and am still using one for browsing (Opera) and note-taking (Zim) when I'm at conferences. I still get heads-turns and kids inching over to take a look over my shoulder everywhere I go.

The XO-1 has an early version of the Pixel Qi screen, and it is extremely functional. I'm still amazed every time I'm reading an ebook on the subway, and walk from the deep darkness of the subway tunnel into blinding, direct sunlight, and the XO-1 display is still completely readable.

The XO-1's processor, however, is quite slow, and that becomes a pain in the neck for browsing. A decently-performing netbook doesn't cost very much these days, but the screens are a disappointment. I'm really looking forward to snagging a Pixel Qi DIY kit, buying a cheap netbook, and fixing up my ride.

Bring it, Mary Lou!

Re:What kind of business model do they have?

[mellon]

They don't *have* to sell the stuff to geeks. The reason that they are such heroes is that despite not having to sell the stuff to us, they've decided to do so anyway, even though we will no doubt be a major pain in their collective asses. Because they think that laptops shouldn't be black boxes.