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Ask Slashdot: Where Are the E-Ink Dashboards?
fsck! writes "My office recently installed a pair of huge plasma TVs to display some metrics and graphs. They only update every 15 minutes or so, and I couldn't help but wonder, why can't this be E-Ink? I searched all over the place but couldn't find anything bigger than 9.5" (Amazon's Kindle DX). I want a >30" E-Ink picture frame with USB or WiFi. Can the Slashdot community find anything greener than these energy sucking plasma TVs that seem to be everywhere?"
Use a white board and erasable marker plotter, computer controlled.
Bonus, it would put you on slashdot and earn you nerd cred. Maybe.
Plasmas can easily be replaced by LED LCD TVs that use a lot less energy.
Another vote for LED
You can get v big 60" jobs quite easily and theres no burn-in esp if theres alot of static content as you imply
E-ink is only black white or grey. So there is very little need for large sized versions. As most things that big you want color for.
a 30" eink display could be built though. make it from panels of smaller units like they do jumbo tron's.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Seriously dude?
Most 60" LED LCD tvs can be run 24/7 for less than $75 a year. That is practically nothing.
Your office could easily save an order of magnitude more by turning the thermostat up 1 degree.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
I currently work in a call centre while I'm studying.
They have 4 large LCD screen in the centre of the rooms, facing outwards. These screens only show how many people are on the phones and how many customers are waiting. This display is updated every 15 seconds.
A large e-Ink display would be perfect for this. There is no colour needed and should save a fair chunk of power. That is, of course, I'm mistaken about the energy usage of e-ink displays?
Surely someone has created one if that is the case? Surely there would be a market for it now? And if you needed a bit of colour, I'm sure basic colour e-ink displays can do the job fine.
It's funny when the editors don't catch unit typos in the summary. Feet instead of inches make me think a 9.5 foot display would be just fine. Only when you see they meant the Kindle display is the typo clear.
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
I love my e-ink reader and I love the idea of a large (color?) e-ink display, but it would require more than just the energy to update the e-ink. For example, in a darkened call center, you'd still need to shine a front light onto it which might not offer much savings over the LED back lighting of an LED LCD.
-Hovsep
Updated every 15 seconds. ... should save a fair chunk of power. That is, of course, I'm mistaken about the energy usage of e-ink dislays.
You are not mistaken. E-ink only uses power when it updates, so for something updated every 15 minutes, that would be 99.9% power savings.
In one type of e-ink display, each pixel is a ball, white on one side, black on the other. The balls sit in grease / oil. Power is used only to turn the balls the right direction, black-side-up or white-side-up. You could unplug it / remove the battery and the display would stay.
Someone is making these. http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/06/giant-e-paper-display-spotted-ogled-at-taiwanese-book-show/ This is from three years ago, so you can bet the technology has improved.
Did you pay for that education?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
True, but with 15-minute updates, the plasma will burn in in a few weeks to months and the LED will stay in decent shape for a few years.
Yes, but that's based on 5 hours a day of usage. Imagine the discrepancy when you're talking about 24 hrs/day or in high priced electricity areas. Also, and I may be wrong on this so please correct me if so, as I recall the LEDs' backlights tend to last a significantly longer time than their plasma counterparts.
Furthermore, if you ever had any scientific credentials, I'd probably be asking for them given the fact that you're comparing two different sized units as though they were completely comparable. 47"42". The only variable that should be changing is the one you're trying to test, and obviously that's not the case here.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
I want a >30' E-Ink picture frame with...
Yep, e-ink billboards...
Wikipedia has this: the jetBook Color
Wouldn't know if that's for sale already, haven't seen such a display in real life. So if anyone has some hands-on experience with this or similar device: please share.
And original poster's question remains very valid. From an ergonomic p.o.v., plasma/LCD/LED simply is not the same as E-ink. What's best in one situation, may not be optimal in another situation. True, LCD or (probably better) LED will consume less power than a plasma display, but E-ink even less since it's static and doesn't produce light itself.
None of that may matter to most consumers, but that doesn't mean there's isn't a market for color E-ink displays. The tech was shown a while ago, so where are the products? Had a look around shops myself a while ago, there were a couple of e-readers with color display, but again: those were LED or LCD/backlight technology, real E-ink devices only in b/w.
It's not $8. Those numbers came from probably very conservative assumptions about how much the average TV buyer actually uses his TV, which probably isn't 24 hours/day (or even 8-16 hours, as you might expect for a TV being used as an in-office "dashboard"). I'm guessing their assumption might be 2 hours/day.
I just did some very rough calculations: if the TV is going to be on 2 hours/day on average, that's 730.5 hours/year. If the TV uses 100W when operating, that's about 73kWh over the whole year. If your power costs $0.20/kWh, then the TV will cost $14.61 to operate for one year.
I'd assume that these "dashboard" TVs will be operated 10-12 hours a day, which is 5-6 times those previous numbers. Plus, commercial electricity costs more than residential, IIRC (I could be wrong about that). So it's probably much closer to $100/year to run these TVs, or maybe more. Still not an astronomical amount of money, though.
What I want to know is: what kind of TVs is the submitter using anyway? He's apparently interested in an e-Ink screen that's 30 FEET diagonally.
Ignoring the rather large screen diagonal difference here, multiplying all figures by a few thousand doesn't magically reverse the price/energy ratio of each of those units.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
perfect use for these.
With e-ink you would probably be able to read them clearly from across the terminal.
This space available.
The summary referred to a 9.5-foot Kindle. That's one hell of a giant e-book reader.
Flipdots Are pretty close to large-scale e-ink
Actually, commercial power is usually cheaper than residential on a per-KWH basis, because they use more and get bumped into a lower cost bracket(if they aren't already there by being on a "commercial" account). The monthly cost, however, is much higher.
The old flipping character displays that were used in airports solved this problem long ago.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-flap_display
And once it's burned in he can turn it off and save loads of power!
Pretty much. Some utilities will kick a residential customer into a higher bracket if they 'use too much', but most actually drop the price for volume customers. Still, the bill consists of a utility charge per kwh, a fuel charge per kwh, and a connection/administration fee that's static.
Most Commercial customers pay a lower kwh charge, but also pay the connection fee, and a feeder charge that's set to their max draw - IE if they need 200A max, that's what they have to pay, even if they only need it for 1 hour a month. Lastly, they can get hit with a power factor charge - Bad PF factors like cheap fluorescent ballasts can raise their cost per kwh.
I don't read AC A human right
I want a >30' E-Ink picture frame with USB or WiFi
30 foot is almost Jumbotron size. Does your office really have room for something that large (to say nothing of the budget)?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
If Sharp really do deliver on their promises, IGZO panels are going to dominate in the next few years. Like e-ink they don't require power for a static image and can be transparent, but unlike e-ink IGZO has fast response/refresh rates and supports high resolutions! There's a 32" 4K coming next month rumoured to be $5,500 US launch price. It's the same panels that caused Apple to release Plan B for the iPad 3.
TLDR; Check out this (cheesy) video where IGZO introduces "himself" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnUUXoFsjoY
That's one hell of a giant e-book reader.
Well, that's based on the amount of psychokinetic energy in the New York area this morning.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
I haven't yet figured out how it happened, but I have a second-hand laptop that clearly displays a ghost image (of a gdm login menu screen), even when output to a second screen.
My best guess is that it's coming from an internal memory buffer. I've never seen it before on any other system, but on this one the effect is very obvious.
E-ink is only black white or gre
That's not true and hasn't been true for a number of years. You can get colour e-ink readers, just not in the US which is, as has become depressingly common for many consumer portable electronics gadgets, running several years behind Asia for newest tech.
Da Blog
It occurs to me that one place you could possibly use E-Ink would be in an actual cars dash, well provided you could make a good way to see it at night anyway. (The main advantage of E-Ink here, would be that the sun wouldn't wash it out, and perhaps you would stop seeing radios so integrated into the car. A radio should just be a radio in my opinion, although there can be value in tossing a GPS in there, if you manage to at least get a double din I suppose. In another thought, I half wish they just sold a double din radio that had a docking station for a standard low cost android tablet that size. That way you could upgrade cheaply, and when it was docked it could automatically be in car mode.
At any rate, with in dash E-Ink you could select how you wanted your dash to look with software, such as which sensors you will monitor and where the displays will be. If you combined it with a touch screen you could even do your own troubleshooting when a problem was detected, provided the software bothered to let you get to the real data. Of course a colored screen would be even better. Even one additional color would help.
I suppose the update rate for E-Ink might be a little slow for some who like to watch tach needles and miles per hour displays update quickly, although some other display tech could be used there I suppose. Then again, if peoples car dashs were configurable, someone would probably want to sell advertising on them, although I suppose laws have protected us from that, so far...
So a 20% smaller screen uses ~60% more energy and you say energy use is 'similar'?
Did you pay for that education?
Not only that, but those numbers represent 5 hours of usage per day at 11 cents per kWh. If these are in use at a company I would assume that they are on at least 8 hours per day, if not 24. The average cost / kWh in the US is 13.5 cents. In NYC it's around 20 cents per kWh.
So we should buy a super expensive product (that doesn't even actually exist) to replace a cheap readily available product. Because we'll save a few dollars a year in electricity.
Why? Are we buying our way into environmentalist heaven?
http://www.eink.com/display_products_iim.html has some samples of what have been done in the retail signage area.. I have no idea the cost, or the practicality of this setup however.. your mileage may vary
If you read my post further, I did note that even when you adjust the numbers for the amount of usage they'd get in this application, it's still not that much money. I was just pointing out that the difference is much more than $8. Of course, if you add in the fact that you'll need to toss out that plasma in 6 months because it'll have burn-in, that adds up to more money, but still not enough to buy some super-expensive product instead of using a cheap off-the-shelf product.
Still, however, this whole post does point out how large e-ink displays could be really useful for certain markets. It's not just his company with their "dashboard"; there's many other posts here pointing out similar applications, from displays outside of university classrooms showing class schedules, to airport displays showing flight statuses. Of course, the fact that e-ink requires sufficient ambient light to be easily readable may be a problem that could limit its use.
What is it with so many people here confidently asserting stuff as if they have a clue and getting it wrong? Have we been infested with people that have done an MBA in shouting?
E-ink is one colour on a background, but the foreground colour can be cyan, magenta, blue, black or whatever. Combine a few and you can have an e-ink device such a the "Jetbook Color" (I purchased one of those for a relative due to the educational software on it + long battery life). Since there's no backlight you don't have the glowing colours that you see on an iPad, or even anything better than 1980s coloured comics on cheap paper, but it is still there.
Repurposed plasma screens are just that; you're making use of a huge supply chain designed for providing TVs to provide for a special purpose application. It would cost rather a lot to produce 30" eink displays, and there aren't many people to spread the initial costs around.
The fabrication costs for 30" are too high.
The way these things are fabricated results in a sufficien number of pixel failures in a 30" display as to make it uneconomical.
They are typically fabricated in large sheets, then the sheets are tested for dead pixels, and then the standard display sizes are cut out from between the dead pixels, and the individual units are retested. The smallest display sizes are used for things like watches and digital thermometers, etc..
The fabrication process has barely improved enough that they can (as of very recently) offer 9.74" displays in quantity sufficient to make them worth manufacturing.
Unless you can personally improve the process/methods to significantly improve yields for larger areas of the sheets, then what you are asking for will remain uneconomical, probably for several decades, as process improvements in LCD, LED, and OLED continue to outstrip E-Ink, and therefore their power consumption costs drop toward that of E-Ink. Currently, the only practical value for E-Ink is power consumption for infrequently updated displays which tend to be power sensitive only because they run off batteries.
So the short answer is you haven't personally invented the fabrication processes yet.
I believe he's using "dashboard" in the Google sense of the word: a computer display, usually in a public area, which is periodically updated with information, such as server status, uptime, software project status, build status, testing status, release engineering information, etc.. They are frequently used in boiler-room situations to remind people of slipping deadlines, source tree instability, testing failures, and so on.
Forget E-Ink, you need something like this:
http://blog.makezine.com/2012/07/18/super-fast-electromagnetic-flip-dot-display/
What I want to know is: what kind of TVs is the submitter using anyway? He's apparently interested in an e-Ink screen that's 30 FEET diagonally.
I'm more interested in that 9.5 foot Kindle...
The problem is the manufacturing process isn't the very good yet, and the big rolls of e-ink they produce have lots of dead pixels in it; the manufactures then have to choose a small shape so they have less wastage (same reason oled tvs have taken so long to get here and are prohibitively expensive).
Rocket Surgeon.
At those kinds of rates solar/wind power starts to look rather enticing. There are numerous home-brew solutions that could allow you to cut that bill down significantly. Some low-cost solar panels and a battery bank that kicks on during peak usage hours for example. This doesn't make sense everywhere but at $0.40/kWh, it might be something to consider. Of course, there will be upfront costs and I'm lazy and only do math out of necessity, but I'm willing to bet that the turnaround on such a project could be at or around ten years if you choose your materials wisely and do most of the work yourself. I'm a tad off-topic here, but that just seems crazy. Also, please excuse my extensive abuse of commas.
The teachers will crack any minute, purple monkey dishwasher.
The original poster was going on the premise that e-ink uses less power because it only needs to be refreshed when something has changed, like a kindle. Since the information only changes once every 10-15 minutes, this would seem ideal.
Your calculations are going under the premise that an e-ink display uses the same amount of energy as a regular tv. Your calculation may be correct but they are out of context.
man that LCD with the LED backlight runs 24/7 and it just rotates through a slide show, can we put it on a timer or something?
who cares, the pc thats running is is sucking 300 watts
I don't think they can make them big, at least not cheaply and big.
> I'm guessing their assumption might be 2 hours/day.
That would be a bizarre assumption. I've never met ANYBODY who uses a TV 2 hours a day. 12 hours a day, yes. 16 hours a day, sure. (More than that generally means being unemployed.)
2 hours a day? That's like smoking two cigarettes a day.
There are, of course, a very few people who smoke only on rare occasions for social reasons but go days at a time without smoking, just as there are a few people who have a TV in a cabinet somewhere that they get out once in a while, but these are the few rare individuals whose unusual body chemistry allows them to partake without becoming addicted. The overwhelming majority of the population can't do that.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Given that the TV operates in an air-conditioned space, you need to apply a ballpark 3x multiplier to this energy cost, as every Watt has to be pumped out using a heat pump running at maybe 35% overall efficiency (this is a conservative figure). $63 vs. $39, now that looks like a real difference to me.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Your solution is trapped by the previous pattern. You're trying to put a new fangled "engine" in your existing horse buggy. You need to go back to the original "problem" that the plasmas were used to solve. Management wants a pretty for their wall, one that makes them feel dynamic and modern. However, assuming you can't truly change the pattern, you can at least subvert it a little...
If the format of the display is fixed, commission a local artist-engineer to produce a moving mechanical display. Physical gauges and dials. Or oversized nixie tubes simulated with EL wire. Or a custom made animated neon sign. Or, since these corporate displays aren't used to actually monitor anything, something more abstract like a series of fountains (labelled if they insist) that represent the data currently displayed. Anything other than two big 5ms 1080P monitors showing a simplistic fixed format display updated once every 15 minutes.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Commercial rates also often include time-of-day rate changes, demand charges for the maximum usage for the month (or for a trailing window of months), and seasonal changes in rates. It can get quite complicated.
No, the peak rates occur during business hours, and summer peak demand almost always occurs at the peak air conditioning demand, which is typically late afternoon. (Winter peak demand can be in the early morning, when electric heat is in heaviest use.)
...and everywhere that a display needs to be viewed in sunlight.
Your heart is in the right place, but your numbers are off. A/C C.O.P. is typically around 3, give or take. The multiplier would usually be less than 2, and in the heating season could be negative.
According to this, the average person in the US watches 4 hours of TV per day.
However, that doesn't mean the average amount of time per day a TV is turned on is the same. First of all, the previous statistic averages in people who don't own TVs at all. Second, sometimes people leave the TV on when they're not watching it. Third, often the same TV gets watched by multiple people. The first two factors would tend to cause the average to increase, while the latter would tend to cause it to decrease. I haven't been able to find enough information to determine either way.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Perhaps I'm getting old, but way before we had plasma TVs and LED/LCD TVs, we had these LED signs that displayed information in just about every business and storefront window.
Now they have full color versions of these, even. And for the simpler ones, the energy usage is measured in watts. As in no more than a standard light bulb or two. The question is, exactly how much writing needs to "change" every 15 minutes or so? If it's just a few lines, a few of those red LED signs/scrolling displays stacked together would work perfectly.
Um, no. My calculations are going under the premise that LED-LCD displays use less energy than plasma displays, which is absolutely true. I'm not addressing e-ink at all.
Here's a direct comparison for you, from my local power company (the largest hydroelectric producer in the world, HydroQuebec) all prices in CAD, and I'm ignoring the fixed costs here:
Residential rate: /kWh /kWh
Power over 50 kW (winter): $6.21 / kW
Power over 50 kW (summer): $1.26 / kW
First 30 kWh per day: 5.32
Remaining consumption: 7.51
Business rates ("low power", below 100 kW every month): /kWh /kWh
Power over 50 kW: $15.54 / kW
First 15,090 kWh: 8.73
Remaining consumption: 4.85
Business rates ("medium power", at least one month a year over 50 kW): /kWh /kWh
Power over 0 kW: $13.44 / kW
First 210,000 kWh: 4.41
Remaining consumption: 3.19
Business rates ("Large power", every month over 5 megawatts): /kWh
Power over 0 kW: $12.18 / kW
All consumption: 2.95
> According to this, the average person in the US watches 4 hours of TV per day.
I suspect that may be a low figure; in particular, the overwhelming majority of TV watchers, if you ask them, will significantly underestimate how much they watch.
Even if it's an accurate average, I'm pretty sure the standard deviation is high...
> First of all, the previous statistic averages in people who don't own TVs at all.
All three of us? I doubt we have very much impact on the average.
However, there are quite a few people who spend so much time away from home that they barely ever have time to watch TV because they're basically never in the house except to sleep -- especially during the warm months. They may catch a couple of hours of TV a week, except for weeks when they're busy, in which case they don't. I would estimate that these people are significantly more numerous than TV non-owners, and so I would say they are likely to have much more impact on the average.
> Second, sometimes people leave the TV on when they're not watching it.
True. People routinely walk out of the room and leave the TV on. In my experience, a lot of people pretty much only turn it off when they are not home and during power outages. (In fact, I know one family that *doesn't* turn it off during power outages, because the TV is the most important reason why they have a generator. Of course there are also some people who leave it on when they're not home on the theory that it will deter burglary, which seems unlikely but whatever.)
> Third, often the same TV gets watched by multiple people.
Indeed. When one person isn't watching it (e.g., because he's at work), somebody else plops down in front of the thing.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
There's actually a pretty big, untapped market for large-format e-ink displays. Two words: Digital Menus.
I once worked for a digital signage company and some of our largest customers were fast food restaurants. Since the menu doesn't change all that much during a 24 hour period, e-ink makes perfect sense. The cost of purchasing multiple large, commercial-grade LCDs was one of the biggest expenditures both in terms of initial outlay as well as TCO (due to the relatively high failure rate of such displays in a high-heat, high-moisture environment). Add to that the cost of electricity to drive a super-bright LCD for 16+ hours per day. As a result, most restaurants won't ever see any cost savings, which also include an on-site labor cost savings, storage and transportation cost savings, and a few other minor details as compared to printed menus. At best, it's usually a wash. (Aside - part of the reason we had those customers is the agreement that we would manage the menu content for them.)
With e-ink, the electricity usage goes WAY down. And, with less electricity comes less heat. That means better screen packaging to protect them from the elements for (probably) fewer failures and replacements. And, since they're a reflective technology rather than emissive (like LCDs), they work great in direct sunlight which means drive-thru menus can be digital, too.
E-ink isn't going to work for full-motion, full-color video. Not for a while, at least. Until they do, traditional LCDs will likely still be used for the flashy, draw-you-in stuff.
My sources are unreliable, but their information is fascinating. -- Ashleigh Brilliant
There is an upper limit on the square inches that the technology can support right now. When I spoke to two companies (eInk and Sipix) that make displays of this type, they were kind of cagey on details but it seems to be driven by both sheet yield and sheet resistance. The yield having an upper bound driven by defect rate, and the sheet resistance limiting how far away, physically, the pixel can be from the driver. They way they are doing things doesn't make it easy to seamlessly tile multiple smaller displays to form a larger one.
I am going to say that the size of the market for e-ink displays that size is extreamly limited. Even eReaders are going over to tablets, as more and more people just want more from a portable device (I on the other hand went from a tablet to an e-ink reader because I wanted shorter bootup times and longer battery life as I read ALL THE TIME).
At work, we have a wall of screens that also just display metrics and data. We don't evne use it for our own use - from my desk, I cannot read those screens. They are to look pretty when investors and VPs come in. AFAIK, e-ink is only available in B&W anyways. So, we have a wall full of $800 off-the-shelf LCDs that display our data. The whole wall probably cost $6,000, and I could probably build the whole thing now for half the costs.
LCDs, while they do pull more electricity than e-readers, still don't pull THAT much. As such, the cost ratio of having this wall of screens that only updates once every few minutes is really not that high.
Now, how many places are actually going to want a 30 inch B&W screen that has a slow refresh rate? While there may be a market for this, I doubt that they would be able to produce these and return a profit and be able to sell these for the same price, or less, than LCDs.
I also doubt that your metrics displays are really even there for your use. At all the companies I have worked at, no worker ever looked over to stare at the data on the wall. It is there to wow investors and VPs. As such, you want the shiniest thing you can get. LCD panels are the way to go.