Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds really cool! Does this project have a name?
The Papertop. (It's a working title.)
PaperPi?
The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet
231–240 of 259 posts
Re: The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet
#232I have been using it since November (second preorder wave). Pros: The e-ink display is great, large enough to show one page of any pdf. The device is light. Taking notes feels good. Battery life is great for reading books, good for taking notes. Cons: Price. In-house cloud storage that you must use (there is a beta setting enabling some weird tunnel over usb, have not tried it yet ...). Apps you must use in order to…
Same group as you. I primarily use it for reading.
Just want to group together a few response to you and others about my experience:
-battery life has been fine, especially when used mostly as a reader.
-no web browser/apps is actually a plus to many who are focused on reading or creative things as they are a distraction. LCD tablets fulfill that need fine.
-no swiping on docs is ok by me - less marks from dirty paws
-refresh rates in my use are not 'one or two seconds.' I think people tend to exaggerate wait times in general. A page flip is probably about half a second when reading Reviews of Modern Physics
-I've only had one crash/reboot.
-The latest software seems a bit snappier and has some improvements when it comes to pen use settings
-No issues while annotating pdfs
-its a little bit slow refreshing the document lists/library but we are talking a second, maybe second and half worst case
-I understand why they are using cloud, though its not really important to me (syncing docs across multiple devices). Likewise, nothing I have is super confidential so that again is not (yet) a big concern to me
-the zoom feature is a little bit clunky and can be improved
-I would like a future iteration to include a backlight
-Any future version should also be slightly larger, perhaps 1x1.5. This would likely enable viewing of letter size docs without the need to crop the margins. That said, its only a minor inconvenience to crop things like journals so they are viewable without the need to zoom
-Some ask for handwriting recognition though I think first (and easier) would be some type of option to do version control on modified documents.
-A fair price is probably closer to $450 but have to remember this is hardware version 1
All in all, I am pretty happy with the device and hope they continue to improve the software. Were a second generation to be released, I would consider upgrading if it had a backlight and faster cpu/memory combo.
[edit for clarity]
Re: The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet
#233Most scientific research is still published as PDFs with small text at A4 size (approx 13inch diag). Anyone has experience reading such material on ReMarkable ~10inch screen?
If you crop the margins on US based journals, you can read a full page. The type is slightly smaller than what it would be if printed on paper, but is more than legible with good eyes or those who wear glasses (me). A4 is close to letter sized so results should be similar.
Note, you can find free software that will batch crop documents. Yes, its an inconvenience but a small one to no longer need to zoom/pan and/or use LCD based devices.
Re: The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've actually been working on something of this sort with a battery-powered Raspberry PI running Debian and a Pervasive 7-inch e-Paper display. I whipped up a pretty decent prototype that had a terminal (so, Emacs, w3m, newsbeuter, etc.), PDF reader, and rough support for keyboard-driven X apps, but then my little girl got to the wiring with scissors, and my momentum died. (It also had a small character LED display t…
Looking forward to more information about this as well. I'm thinking about wiring up an e-Paper display to a Pi for some digital signage applications and curious how you got it all to work, and the prices for doing so!
I used a 7.4" display from Pervasive, about $50USD. It's a simple development board with an easy to drive controller. All the software was in Python, with a few performance-critical bits in Cython. I used wire wrapping to hook things up, and it was not difficulty, even though I'm a programmer with no previous hardware experience.
Re: The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've actually been working on something of this sort with a battery-powered Raspberry PI running Debian and a Pervasive 7-inch e-Paper display. I whipped up a pretty decent prototype that had a terminal (so, Emacs, w3m, newsbeuter, etc.), PDF reader, and rough support for keyboard-driven X apps, but then my little girl got to the wiring with scissors, and my momentum died. (It also had a small character LED display t…
Ditto, very interested. You wouldn't happen to have any photos of the prototype, would you?
I have at least a photo of emacs running on a very early version, but it's not representative of what I eventually arrived at. I'll see if I can dig it up.
Re: The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet
#236I purchased the remarkable and was really disappointed. I ended up returning it. Ultimately, if i'm spending $700 for a writing tablet (after accessories), it has to work as described. Some of the deal breaking issues: - Battery lasts for hours, not days. - Mobile apps are buggy, viewing notes caused them to crash - Randomly stops responding to pen - Randomly freezes up - Customer support takes weeks to respond - Ere…
I have one, and my biggest issue with the UI was the pen settings not being retained, but they did fix that in the latest update. Apparently they made some changes to improve battery life as well.
Re: The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
So because it's not easy, it shouldn't be done? Personally I would be ok with my device disabling it's UI while it emulated a mass storage device when plugged into a host.
They had a variety of pretty big engineering challenges to solve: getting the form factor right, making sure your hand didn't interfere with the screen while using it, getting the pen-and-paper feel right, and getting the e-ink refresh rate down to where you could draw and write on it and have it feel natural. I'm fine with them choosing to solve those challenges instead of supporting USB mass storage.
...and designing, developing, and supporting your own custom application and its associated protocol isn't an "engineering challenge"?
USB mass storage requires exposing a block device with a filesystem, which is error-prone and complex.
The point is, USBMS is a solved problem. My MP3/MP4 players, my Android phone, my satnav, even my soldering iron[1] can do it. The Linux kernel, which reMarkable uses, already includes support for this[2]. It's conceptually very simple --- in its most basic form, if the device detects that it's plugged in, it unmounts its internal block device and lets the host control it, and vice-versa. More advanced functionality, such as found on Android and many MP3/MP4s, lets you choose whether the device or the host controls its storage, via a very obvious interface on the device itself (one position is "charge only", the other is "transfer files".)
[1]https://hackaday.com/2017/07/24/review-ts100-soldering-iron/
[2]https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/usb/mass-storage.tx...
Re: The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet
#238Been using mine since the first batch went out and it's a great replacement for paper, for notes.
The one thing that annoys me is the battery life (about 6 hours of more or less continuous use). So during a work day I end up having to keep it permanently connected while at my desk (easier than charging at odd times). I understand why it's not as energy cheap as just an e-ink reader, but what annoys me is that they obviously decided to sacrifice battery size to make it light. The result is that the device is almost _too_ light and thin.
I'd take twice the weight for more battery life.
Re: The ReMarkable E Ink Tablet
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
The GP and lima have both claimed that one can transfer files without the cloud, but this is not mentioned in their FAQ ( https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us ). This is a direct quote: "Use the reMarkable desktop app or the reMarkable mobile app to transfer documents and ebooks onto your device. Once imported, your files will be synced across your connected devices. reMarkable works best with our custom built app…
> Maybe this is a great device which allows open access, but it's very difficult to figure this out from their website. Isn't that par for the course for esoteric information only useful to highly advanced users in the consumer electronics[1] space? I'm yet to see an Android device that touts unlockable bootloaders on their websites. 1. Being "open" isn't the ReMarkable's tablet schtick/selling point. It's a consumer…
I'm talking about being able to transfer your files between two devices sitting 10cm apart, without using someone elses servers.
This is a very basic feature, supported by everything except those spyware products which are selling customer information or those that reserve the right to do it in the future.
If reMarkable is not one of those, they should make it clear in their marketing.