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Building an E-Ink Laptop

alexsoto.dev

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Re: Building an E-Ink Laptop

#11

Post by alex-a-soto »

jakecopp wrote: post #6
alex-a-soto wrote: post #2

Hey folks, I've recently had the idea of building an e-ink laptop from the devices I had at home. I decided to document the process and share each step of the way: Some of the posts planned for the series are: Dasung Paperlike HD-FT teardown, Thinkpad T480 teardown, Creating the prototype, Installing and configuring NixOS, M-x e-ink-laptop-mode If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out.

I've been thinking about such a project for a long time (maybe incorporating a raspi & Dactyl mechanical keyboard instead) but never got around to building something (bought an M1 instead haha). Congrats on the build and write up, it looks awesome and I'll be following your posts!

Thank you! The Raspberry Pi and a Dactyl mechanical keyboard sound like a lovely combination. If you ever decide to go ahead and build it, let me know!

Re: Building an E-Ink Laptop

#12

Post by zepto »

alex-a-soto wrote: post #2

Hey folks, I've recently had the idea of building an e-ink laptop from the devices I had at home. I decided to document the process and share each step of the way: Some of the posts planned for the series are: Dasung Paperlike HD-FT teardown, Thinkpad T480 teardown, Creating the prototype, Installing and configuring NixOS, M-x e-ink-laptop-mode If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out.

Great project - I’ve also thought about this kind of thing.

Have you experimented with the Dasung Display much? I tried one and found it too noisy at displaying text.

Admittedly it was just connected to a Mac, but it deterred me from keeping hold of it.

Also - does ‘M-x e-ink-laptop-mode’ refer to a real thing, or is that a placeholder for something you are going to write?

Re: Building an E-Ink Laptop

#13

Post by freeqaz »

myself248 wrote: post #10
jagger27 wrote: post #8

$1000 for the screen. These E-ink patents can’t expire soon enough.

So what I don't get, is there's no shortage of jurisdictions where intellectual property doesn't seem to be worth the paper it's printed on, and really convincing counterfeits flood some well-known markets. Where are the e-ink knockoffs? What sort of enforcement are these folks doing that nobody else seems to be able to?

They apparently buy up any competition to keep the market small. There have been other similar tech promised by startups but they buy them up. Pretty interesting! Infuriating too, of course. But the system is what it is. I'm surprised they can't make more money by cross licensing the tech and just granting royalties. I'm no economics expert though.

Re: Building an E-Ink Laptop

#14

Post by derekp7 »

myself248 wrote: post #10
jagger27 wrote: post #8

$1000 for the screen. These E-ink patents can’t expire soon enough.

So what I don't get, is there's no shortage of jurisdictions where intellectual property doesn't seem to be worth the paper it's printed on, and really convincing counterfeits flood some well-known markets. Where are the e-ink knockoffs? What sort of enforcement are these folks doing that nobody else seems to be able to?

The truth is that most real consumers (as apposed to us technologists) don't want e-ink technology. It is monochrome, can't do video, limited interactive due to refresh rate and ghosting... the only real thing it has going for it is low power usage. And that pairs well with applications where you spend a long time staring at the screen, and periodically initiating a compute burst to change the screen contents. In other words, e-readers and note-taking devices.

And consumers are fairly satisfied with devices that get charged once every day, and can take a 15 minute quick-charge to add multiple hours of additional usage to them.

Re: Building an E-Ink Laptop

#15

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

freeqaz wrote: post #13
myself248 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what I don't get, is there's no shortage of jurisdictions where intellectual property doesn't seem to be worth the paper it's printed on, and really convincing counterfeits flood some well-known markets. Where are the e-ink knockoffs? What sort of enforcement are these folks doing that nobody else seems to be able to?

They apparently buy up any competition to keep the market small. There have been other similar tech promised by startups but they buy them up. Pretty interesting! Infuriating too, of course. But the system is what it is. I'm surprised they can't make more money by cross licensing the tech and just granting royalties. I'm no economics expert though.

> "They apparently buy up any competition to keep the market small."

Which companies / patents did they buy up? I keep seeing this rumor floating around but their Wikipedia article lists exactly one acquisition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_Ink#Acquisition) and a casual Google doesn't show any others.

Re: Building an E-Ink Laptop

#16

Post by ggm »

I accept viewed from the 7billion people problem olpc achieved only millions. None the less, olpc did achieve the scale of millions. It says quite a lot that 3 millions is failure. I guess it depends how your goal is measured.

(I never worked on it, no skin in the game)

Re: Building an E-Ink Laptop

#18

Post by FlyMoreRockets »

jagger27 wrote: post #8

$1000 for the screen. These E-ink patents can’t expire soon enough.

The PixelQi display spun from the OLPC project was really good and clearly affordable, considering the original target market. Granted, E-ink is superior in many aspects, but I'd settle for a sunlight readable, low power monochrome LCD display. As an added benefit it updates much faster than E-ink.

Re: Building an E-Ink Laptop

#19

Post by FlyMoreRockets »

ggm wrote: post #16

I accept viewed from the 7billion people problem olpc achieved only millions. None the less, olpc did achieve the scale of millions. It says quite a lot that 3 millions is failure. I guess it depends how your goal is measured. (I never worked on it, no skin in the game)

I loved my OLPC, especially the sunlight readable, low power display!

Could it easily be grafted onto something like a RasPi, maybe with a mechanical keyboard and trackpad and lots of Li cells?

Re: Building an E-Ink Laptop

#20

Post by blululu »

Very cool! I once ran an E-ink display as an external monitor on a laptop to that I could work outside. I recall the latency was pretty much unworkable for typing, but that may have been the way the driver was setup. Curious to hear how usable this is for work - would love to see a video of this thing in use.
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