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Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

eliot.blog

31–40 of 211 posts

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#31
post #8

Posh frames e-ink friends! Here's my generative newspaper: https://i.imgur.com/tD1t9u3.jpeg My wallet stopped at 13.3" though :) Update for those who saw me post it before: I recently charged the battery for the first time since hanging it in March, which met my expectations. Shout-out also to the people at Halbe Rahmen, the best picture frames in the world.

Where is the information on how you built it?

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#32
post #8

Posh frames e-ink friends! Here's my generative newspaper: https://i.imgur.com/tD1t9u3.jpeg My wallet stopped at 13.3" though :) Update for those who saw me post it before: I recently charged the battery for the first time since hanging it in March, which met my expectations. Shout-out also to the people at Halbe Rahmen, the best picture frames in the world.

Where is the information on how you built it?

There's some info on my Hackaday project listing: https://hackaday.io/project/190478-hyepaper

Also the album link in the other comment.

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#33
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically, it’ll be when the patents expire.

My understanding is it's much more about demand than patents. LED panels got cheap because we built factories that pump out a lot of them.

I just glanced, they still want about 500 bucks for the 13" screen and half of that for the board to drive it. While I have no clue what making the screen at a low scale might cost, the board cannot possibly be five times more expensive than a Raspberry Pi, can it?

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#34
post #5

That's a very neat project. The only issue I have with it is that it's basically a passive energy waster. It produces images by burning GPU power, when it could instead curate art from an existing amount of art (of which there is more to ever go through, almost in any category). Some projects that use AI could be replaced with other tech and be much more efficient.

They should render these images when there’s excess renewable energy, then store them for later.

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#35
post #29

Samsung sells an LED TV specifically for this use case. Currently only at 4K. https://www.samsung.com/us/tvs/the-frame/highlights/

A friend has the Samsung Frame and I think you can only interface with it via the Samsung SmartThings app. It's quite closed. So you need an online thing for the TV and then you upload it into their app.

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#36
post #18

Well done. There would be so many more cool applications of e-ink if it wasn't $2,500 for a 42" display: https://shopkits.eink.com/en/product/detail/42''MonochromeeP... (minimum order 3) For comparison a 42" full-color 60fps TV with remote, speakers, wifi, etc. etc. is $140. It seems like the patent holder could be making a lot more money if they dropped the price.

Hmm. I wonder what the whole-sale price is? A TV with wifi is partly subsidized by the ads you see when you turn it on. This 2500$ display seems like it’s for small run signage, so they know it’s being sold for government/business use. Probably a bit inflated.

Does Rakutan/Amazon/Pocketbook really pay a similar cost/size ratio for the panels on their ereaders? I hope not!

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#37
post #33
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is it's much more about demand than patents. LED panels got cheap because we built factories that pump out a lot of them.

I just glanced, they still want about 500 bucks for the 13" screen and half of that for the board to drive it. While I have no clue what making the screen at a low scale might cost, the board cannot possibly be five times more expensive than a Raspberry Pi, can it?

No, simple driver boards aren't super complicated. Nor are the chips on them manufactured on the fanciest nodes. They're not super-high-volume either though and as a result somewhat expensive on a BoM.

Here's the data sheet for the ITE IT8951, a frequently-used ASIC for this purpose that supports basic partial updates as well: https://www.waveshare.net/w/upload/1/18/IT8951_D_V0.2.4.3_20...

Here's a sourcing price: https://www.win-source.net/products/detail/ite/it8951e-64-dx...

It's basically a fairly simple SPI interface (or here a SPI wrapper around an internal Z80 protocol). The rest of the board is power supply handling and a DRAM framebuffer chip, external to the driver ASIC on SPI as well. I wrote a custom driver for this in Rust for my project, and it only took about a day despite a few leaky-abstractions oddities in how it communicates over SPI.

The chip itself is basically buffer handling, image processing (features like JPEG decode, resampling and some LUT mechanisms) and a waveform generator. Others will have some IP blocks for, say, a HDMI frontend. Any decent chip company can crank this out pretty quick. There's easily 10+ product lines on the market.

For simple things you may not even need one and can drive the panel from an MCU directly.

There are more expensive, more advanced drivers that implement more complicated and higher-performance (say, refresh rate) update schemes or I/O though.

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#38
post #18

Well done. There would be so many more cool applications of e-ink if it wasn't $2,500 for a 42" display: https://shopkits.eink.com/en/product/detail/42''MonochromeeP... (minimum order 3) For comparison a 42" full-color 60fps TV with remote, speakers, wifi, etc. etc. is $140. It seems like the patent holder could be making a lot more money if they dropped the price.

>For comparison a 42" full-color 60fps TV with remote, speakers, wifi, etc. etc. is $140.

Because it's a lot easier and cheaper to manufacture large LCD panels at scale than E-ink film.

>It seems like the patent holder could be making a lot more money if they dropped the price.

I don't know any company or shareholders that would say no to making more money so if this would actually be true then it would, but that's not the reality.

The FUD that large e-ink displays are expensive because of some patent conspiracy needs to stop.

Large e-ink screens are expensive because manufacturing yields are very low and so are sales volumes.

Source: worked with e-ink on products with big and small displays

Edit: So I'm saying the truth and getting down voted for it? Fine, then feel free to keep believing whatever you think is the truth. No point in discussing it further.

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#39
post #18

Well done. There would be so many more cool applications of e-ink if it wasn't $2,500 for a 42" display: https://shopkits.eink.com/en/product/detail/42''MonochromeeP... (minimum order 3) For comparison a 42" full-color 60fps TV with remote, speakers, wifi, etc. etc. is $140. It seems like the patent holder could be making a lot more money if they dropped the price.

I've read (probably on prior HN discussions about this?) that the manufacturing process still has major yield issues— when you're making small displays, you can slice around the bad pixels and not have to waste as much, but making a large display requires a huge sheet to all be perfect.

Then again, if that was really it, surely there'd be a market for people who want a 42" e-ink display and are willing to accept some proportion of bad pixels in exchange for a deep discount. Which really shouldn't matter much, particularly for applications where distance-viewing is the expectation.

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#40
post #29

Samsung sells an LED TV specifically for this use case. Currently only at 4K. https://www.samsung.com/us/tvs/the-frame/highlights/

I have one of these, and only in a very specific environment is it convincing as not-a-TV (aside from the concerns of privacy and their proprietary app).

Especially at night, I find the backlight makes it painfully obvious that it's just a TV and I'd much rather have something like e-ink which blends into the surroundings.

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