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Building an E-Ink Laptop

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Re: Building an E-Ink Laptop

#71

Post by AshamedCaptain »

pickledish wrote: post #5

Ha, this is a good write-up on a very interesting topic I’ve been thinking about a lot myself recently. The setup I’ve been thinking of putting together is similar, except I’ve been wanting to pair an e-ink monitor with something like a Raspberry Pi 400 ( https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-400 ) for a kind of deliberately-slow, ultra-low-wattage dev and writing environment. End result would be extremel…

The RP400 is all but "deliberality slow, ultra low wattage". It is actually faster and consumes more power than some low-end x86 laptops (Celeron, Atom)!

Re: Building an E-Ink Laptop

#72

Post by jacquesm »

fy20 wrote: post #61
suyula wrote: post #36

Has anybody tried to retrofit a transflector into a laptop LCD screen? I've got no idea if this is even possible but I'd love to be able to just trigger a brightness=0 and see a smartwatch-type display that doesn't strain my eyes.

I came across a forum post asking about this. As it says you need to remove the polariser layers which is fairly easy (last time I replaced a laptop LCD it fell apart on disassembly and I was presented with many layers of plastic), but OP couldn't find a transreflector layer that was suitable. Without that it's too bright in sunlight, but maybe for indoor use it's good enough. I wonder if something like window tintin…

How about carefully placed strips of retroreflective tape behind the display?

Re: Building an E-Ink Laptop

#73

Post by _ph_ »

pickledish wrote: post #5

Ha, this is a good write-up on a very interesting topic I’ve been thinking about a lot myself recently. The setup I’ve been thinking of putting together is similar, except I’ve been wanting to pair an e-ink monitor with something like a Raspberry Pi 400 ( https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-400 ) for a kind of deliberately-slow, ultra-low-wattage dev and writing environment. End result would be extremel…

The pi-400 seems to be a great match for an eInk display, I would be very interested in any progress you make!

Re: Building an E-Ink Laptop

#74

Post by _ph_ »

fortran77 wrote: post #21
derekp7 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 oth…

The "Patents are Bad!" trope always comes up in any e-ink thread. Not sure why. I love e-ink (I prefer to read books on a kindle), but I think if the demand were there the prices would come down, as you pointed out.

From what I read, the way eInk conducts their business, it is very difficult to launch new eInk products. This limits the available offerings which means there is no competition to drive the market priced down. I bought a reMarkable 2 because it seems to be perhaps the only device on the market which doesn't require a jailbreak or such to do even the most basic customizations. The only other alternative I have seen so far are DIY projects attaching a raw eInk screen to a Rapberry Pi.

Re: Building an E-Ink Laptop

#75

Post by ggm »

FlyMoreRockets wrote: post #19
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?

The word "easily" aside, yes. My reasoning, it was actually talking to an arm RTOS core which was the soft bus to the cpu doing the gui and sugar.

Re: Building an E-Ink Laptop

#77

Post by coldtea »

robinsoh wrote: post #66
coldtea wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demand doesn't bring prices down. Or not much anyway. Everybody would like a Ferrari/Rolex/etc., but they don't get cheaper because of it. In fact, high demand combined with a monopoly means you don't need to lower prices at all. (You lower price to raise demand, but you don't need to if you have strong demand at your current prices). Competition does lower prices. And with patents competition is impossible. As if fo…

> Demand doesn't bring prices down. Or not much anyway. In my experience in the display industry, the main driver of price is cost and the main driver of cost is volume. If a customer puts in a signed escrowed order for a million displays lilke what Apple did, then processes get scaled, factories get built, and per-unit prices go down. That my understanding of how 6" matrix E-Ink displays went from costing thousands…

>I can't understand what exactly you're talking about.

I'm talking about exactly this: if a company holds patents on a technology, other companies can't improve the same technology (using parts of the patented tech and improving specific aspects with inventions of their own) without licensing it.

>This extraordinary claim requires evidence.

Nothing extraordinary, and it's not about E-ink being cheap or expensive, it's just an invariant where there are patents.

Re: Building an E-Ink Laptop

#78

Post by _ph_ »

As there are now several eReaders on the market which have a 10 inch eInk screen, it would be so great, if there was one which implements displaylink and could just be plugged via USB into any computer. This would immediately enable a lot of usages.

Re: Building an E-Ink Laptop

#79

Post by Kliment »

fortran77 wrote: post #21
derekp7 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 oth…

The "Patents are Bad!" trope always comes up in any e-ink thread. Not sure why. I love e-ink (I prefer to read books on a kindle), but I think if the demand were there the prices would come down, as you pointed out.

I think it comes up whenever there's the opportunity because patents are legitimately bad. And I think it's the other way around - if prices were low and volumes were high lots of people would make cool marginal products with them.

Re: Building an E-Ink Laptop

#80

Post by hutzlibu »

TylerE wrote: post #42
iamcreasy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool project. What's the refresh rate of the screen? Can you scroll down a webpage without a lot of latency?

It's going to be bad. Like 500ms probably. Scrolling is pretty much worse case. The more of the display you repaint the longer it's going to take. There's also a trade off...getting faster refresh means worse resolution and contrast.

So for lots of UI interactivity like scrolling etc. it might make sense to automatically adjust the resolution and contrast to optimize for speed (so you know roughly where you scrolled at) and then do a proper refresh once it is idle again. But I suppose this is out of the current scope of the project ...
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