161–170 of 171 posts
The main problem with e-ink is finding a display that doesn't cost 5x what an LCD of the same size would cost. This display was $179 before it became unavailable. That's on the low end for such displays bigger than phone-sized. If the e-ink people ever overcome their cost problem, we'll see many more products.
Is there any kind of projector display might would work for this?
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no one who has the education to do careful engineering is being discouraged They are, because they think this stuff is just as good --- and it clogs the search results for those who do want to dig deeper. I often have to add "-Arduino -Maker" and a bunch of other filters to my search results to find the actually useful stuff.
This stuff IS good! It inspires people to task themselves with projects they don’t yet know how to do, and blog about what error codes they received and what they did to fix it. Besides, how can you look down on them when you’re googling for answers instead of, you know, RTFM / getting your engineering degree?
That is often more than useless to everyone not exactly in that one person's situation.
Besides, how can you look down on them when you’re googling for answers instead of, you know, RTFM / getting your engineering degree?
When trying to find TFM is itself a problem... I'm definitely not one to want to be "censoring misinformation" unlike a lot of others, but the blind leading the blind is certainly happening a lot and it doesn't help anyone.
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Probably that's why you can't make money on it at scale that you can with any addictive type of device and so it's not attractive for most entrepreneurs - a lot of work to put in and not enough money to even buy a Cessna.
I’m trying to make it work as a product. I tend agree it’s a super niche market though. https://www.invisible-computers.com/
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These projects have a pleasant "lo-fi zen" aspect that makes them attractive, I think. They are simple, provide value yet fade into the background without sucking your attention like some other gadgets.
It’s because it’s not lit. It looks natural, and unobtrusive. I’d love to have this, art, and other “appliances” and slabs with eink. Ex. My todo list. My email etc.
He knows what an e-ink display is. He knows it’s not lit. You don’t need to explain it to him.
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yes, but trying to generate a nice rendered image on a stand-alone uProcessor is pretty hard. I don't like that it takes headless chrome to render, but it _works_ and fills a need for the maker. I'm pretty sure they looked at the stuff they'd need to write (A layout engine, a anti aliasing library, a calendar parsing library, an image handling library) and thought "fuck that, lets use a pi". It terms of time thats we…
> trying to generate a nice rendered image on a stand-alone uProcessor is pretty hard. Did you see the rendering? It is very simple, and does not require PIL. There are plenty of embedded GUI libraries that are specifically for this kind of application (uFX, Qt). Why not learn something new? I want HN to be a place where experts critique ideas, not a Facebook/Instagram like-fest ego-stroke. I was proposing a deeper d…
I was critiquing your world view that _everyone_ must at all times go really deep into software so that everything can fit inside 4mbit of flash.
I was also also critiquing your strongly held opinion that simply because a microprocessor has low power states, it doesn't mean that its quick, easy or indeed achievable to render a nice calendar entirely onboard. (it is of course possible, but I know it would take me a lot of time and be no fun.)
Perhaps the goal of the project was to get something that looked nice in a time frame that was reasonable. Perhaps the goal was not to spend time learning how to do antialiasing, font handling, calendar parsing in a power constrained environment.
The joy of the internet is that they have shared their work, now you can build on it and make a good looking eink calendar that's battery powered on some tiny ARM SoC with 4kb of ram.
Whilst you're at it, I propose that you go out of your comfort zone and remake this https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/projects/stock-ticker-machin... to make it purely electro mechanical. it can't be that hard.
The main problem with e-ink is finding a display that doesn't cost 5x what an LCD of the same size would cost. This display was $179 before it became unavailable. That's on the low end for such displays bigger than phone-sized. If the e-ink people ever overcome their cost problem, we'll see many more products.
Huh, I see non tri-color version is still available in my country (Poland): https://kamami.pl/en/displays-for-raspberry-pi/577635-1248in... but forget the "less money" part...
This project is really cool, but I would prefer to have "a new picture every morning" in a frame than a calendar. For my purposes the e-ink displays are still a bit too small....
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>There are 31" and 42" e-ink displays available, but they cost a few thousand dollars. The 42" is pretty close to 2ft by 3ft, 25" x 33". I must have 4 or 5 old Kindles in a drawer by now, somehow. I wonder if you could hack together a grid of old Kindles to make a giant e-ink screen?
A lot of these kinds of projects render out an image and send that to the display. If you did it on a server, cut up the images, and had each kindle pull their image it should be pretty trivial. The only immediate issue that comes to mind is making sure they're relatively in sync when pulling a new image if you're worried about polling too often.
Can’t explain why but all these E-Ink projects are so awesome and attractive to me. I’m surprised I can’t just buy a bunch of E-Ink style gizmos from some company to decorate my home and office. My wallet would be wide open to it constantly. Great work and congrats on this!
I think I know why these look so attractive: e-ink is the perfect blend between technology (screen can display whatever you want) and the analogue/physical world (it looks like a piece of paper which you can put in a wooden frame and interact with). Another example for me is the “Buddha Machine” by FM3 ( https://www.fm3buddhamachine.com ): it’s basically a box that plays some ambient loops (technology) but it looks l…
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A new version that uses WiFi instead of a defunct paging network would be nice.
Plans to mod original ones so the meters could be driven by a micro-controller or Raspberry Pi would be cool.
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I just used an old eBook reader I had lying around. It shows the weather forecast.
Did you repurpose the screen or use the e-reader software to point to a data source?
I just made a simple weather web app which connects to a free service. This works great. I could have written a little Android app to do the same, but my memory of Android UI is that I never ‘got’ it so this seemed easier.