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E Ink Waveforms are a closely guarded secret

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Re: E Ink Waveforms are a closely guarded secret

#121
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can measure samples of the waveform, but the tricky part is how the waveform changes with temperature and aging of the e-ink panel to produce minimal ghosting under all conditions.

That's a good machine learning problem. Point a camera at the thing as you change conditions and the waveform and let hill-climbing do the tuning for you.

Wouldn't it be difficult to model the passage of time, without running the experiment for years on end?

Re: E Ink Waveforms are a closely guarded secret

#122

Ben Krasnow (Applied Science on YouTube) did some research into driving e-Ink displays, and he made some similar observations: > All of the lookup table information has been removed from this datasheet, because the industry thrives on secrecy or something Highly recommended, as usual for him it's a great video/write-up: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsbiO8EAsGw * http://benkrasnow.blogspot.com/2017/10/fast-partia…

Yeah, his series is really great and it made me realize the FW flashed on these CARTA panels are actually nothing but the raw waveforms themselves.

One thing that I want to note is that while their documentation might be closely guarded secret, the actual waveforms are actually available out in the open.

For instance here are the raw waveforms for one of the latest Carta generation e-paper panel:

https://github.com/canselcik/libremarkable/blob/master/refer...

  ~ hexdump -C epdc_ES103CS1.fw | head -10
  00000000  34 88 c4 7c 01 2d 01 00  dd 09 00 00 07 06 a4 00  |4..|.-..........|
  00000010  03 58 21 1d 3c ca 01 85  02 00 00 00 40 00 00 fe  |.X!........|
  00000050  cb 06 00 00 00 00 00 c8  8d 0a 00 00 00 00 00 a8  |................|
  00000060  4f 0e 00 00 00 00 00 98  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 a0  |O...............|
  00000070  65 00 00 00 00 00 00 a8  bc 00 00 00 00 00 00 b0  |e...............|
  00000080  0b 01 00 00 00 00 00 b8  5a 01 00 00 00 00 00 c0  |........Z.......|
  00000090  aa 01 00 00 00 00 00 c8  31 02 00 00 00 00 00 d0  |........1.......|

Re: E Ink Waveforms are a closely guarded secret

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wouldn't work outside in bright light, and would send bad blue light though. Been waiting for an e-ink laptop specifically for working with it outside in the sunlight, and in the evening, since blue light is supposed to be really bad for humans at night.

Me too...E-Ink/Clear Ink/Mirasol whatever I don't care...just something reflective and not an LED backlight shining in my eyes. I am angry the patent greed has stunted this for so long. There is no physical reason we cannot have laptops and desktop displays with this tech, it's all business bullshit.

Is it a patent issue?

Re: E Ink Waveforms are a closely guarded secret

#124
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wouldn't work outside in bright light, and would send bad blue light though. Been waiting for an e-ink laptop specifically for working with it outside in the sunlight, and in the evening, since blue light is supposed to be really bad for humans at night.

For 1000 USD you can get a Boox Max 2, which is basically full-fledged Android tablet with a great stylus, and which is better as HDMI-capable display too. "Dasung Paperlike PRO vs Onyx Boox Max2 Pro Extended Monitor" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pw-oCItgx8

I've heard the main thing is input lag; dasung it's tolerable for typing but onyx boox it isn't. That video basically doesn't measure it.

Re: E Ink Waveforms are a closely guarded secret

#125

E Ink seems to be one of the technologies that is hampered solely by patents. It's too sad that we're only going to get major innovations in e ink tech in 15-20 Years...

You can't keep things secret by patenting them. These are trade secrets, which last indefinitely. However, trade secrets are granted fewer protections.

and the historic basis of patents is “Strong protection for 20 years, but you gotta share your invention”.

Re: E Ink Waveforms are a closely guarded secret

#126
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you use an e-ink display for videos? The main advantage is the low power consumption because it needs power only to refresh, using it for a video it will negate that advantage and draw much more power than a traditional display with an awful image quality...

1. Currently, I use it for writing code and reading papers. However, I still want the monitor to be a good enough drop-in monitor for things I need to occasionally do. For example, I need to switch to a browser window to check what was that error I'm getting. 2. Visual snow syndrome: Many had their first experience of visual snow after staring into the screen for too long. People who believe in that is the cause of v…

Visual snow was a thing years before computer monitor existed.

Re: E Ink Waveforms are a closely guarded secret

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's a question of total light intensity, not of being reflected or "direct" (whatever that means).

I don't think so myself because I don't have pain in full sunlight reading print or E-Ink which is much brighter "nits" than an LED backlight produces ....but even low settings on an LED backlit computer hurt. There is in my opinion a difference between looking into a light source and looking at things that are visible due to reflected light like E-Ink, paper, the objects around us even if I cannot quantify it with s…

This makes no sense to me. There is only one kind of light and it has just so many parameters: basically, the distribution of intensities along the spectrum. If reflected and emitted light have the same intensities there is no physical way to distinguish them.

Re: E Ink Waveforms are a closely guarded secret

#130
post #41
post #27

Here is a teardown of a 13.3 high perf E-ink monitor I did a few months ago: https://kevzettler.com/2018/02/11/dasung-paperlike-pro-teard... The post identifies some on market E-ink display components and discusses the design of a proprietary display driver.

"On closer inspection all the chip components have had their labels chemically peeled off to prevernt reverse engineering." Wow, I've never seen that. Is it a common thing? It also puts me off buying one of these (assuming the $900 price tag hadn't put me off already).

Common enough, the other approach is to have the the manufacturer print a label of your choosing on your batch. no one likes it and anyone serious is going to decap it and figure it out anyway.
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