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$2 WeAct Display FS adds a 0.96-inch USB information display to your computer

cnx-software.com

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Re: $2 WeAct Display FS adds a 0.96-inch USB information display to your computer

#101

Post by red369 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #57
QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> inline USB-C power draw monitor I have a couple of those and I love them! Mine support up to 100W power draw. Before I got them, I hadn’t ever considered that a variable amount of power could be drawn by a laptop while charging. For example, right now my laptop is at 63% battery and currently charging. It’s drawing 36W at the moment. When the battery charge is lower, it’s drawing more power from the outlet, and the…

Ages ago I measured how much power it took for the Start menu to open in Windows 7 on a Dell desktop that was fairly average at the time. In my somewhat crude measurement it was 20W for about 2 seconds.

Brilliant! Thanks for measuring this - I know it may be crude, but it’s also the best measurement I have ever heard of for this!

Assuming you like that kind of thing, maybe you can also test the power drain from displaying seconds in the taskbar in Windows 11. I know Raymond Chen posted an article about it, but I’d be interested whether you can spot a difference. If it really is on the order of 5 mW, then I assume you can’t detect it.

One of the downsides of only using a laptop is that you can’t see this level of detail because the battery acts as a buffer.

Re: $2 WeAct Display FS adds a 0.96-inch USB information display to your computer

#102

Post by vasac »

0x457 wrote: post #35
amelius wrote: post #28

What was that extra bar of information called on Macbooks? Were they a success?

Touch Bar. Given that it was removed in 2021 I'd say - No. However, the issue for me with it was that it replaced a functional key that I want to be tactile. While it's nice to slide a finger to control brightness and volume... I still want actual Esc and co to be physical keys.

Later, they made Macs with both a physical Esc key and a Touch Bar. It was a bit better, but it still sucked.

Re: $2 WeAct Display FS adds a 0.96-inch USB information display to your computer

#103

Post by transcriptase »

IgorPartola wrote: post #57
QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> inline USB-C power draw monitor I have a couple of those and I love them! Mine support up to 100W power draw. Before I got them, I hadn’t ever considered that a variable amount of power could be drawn by a laptop while charging. For example, right now my laptop is at 63% battery and currently charging. It’s drawing 36W at the moment. When the battery charge is lower, it’s drawing more power from the outlet, and the…

Ages ago I measured how much power it took for the Start menu to open in Windows 7 on a Dell desktop that was fairly average at the time. In my somewhat crude measurement it was 20W for about 2 seconds.

Imagine what the draw is for opening some bloated electron monstrosity like Teams or Discord these days.

Re: $2 WeAct Display FS adds a 0.96-inch USB information display to your computer

#104

Post by transcriptase »

nick49488171 wrote: post #85
makosdv wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I hope they put displays on more things. The trends are weird though, since some things that used to have displays no longer have them; you have to use the app on your phone instead...

That's so they can charge a subscription

Nah to get you to give the “share location” permission while pairing, so they sell that telemetry to data brokers.

Re: $2 WeAct Display FS adds a 0.96-inch USB information display to your computer

#105

Post by Nursie »

weinzierl wrote: post #21

I recently researched USB connected information displays but I am interested in e-Ink. I want - USB power + data - Open interface so I can drive it from my own software on the host (but not like a traditional monitor, I imagine more uploading pre-rendered bitmaps) - Image retention when powered off - High resolution paper like appearance - Between A5 and A4 in size - At least black, red and yellow as colors - Buttons…

So a few years ago I hacked up this sort of thing.

I bought a generic epaper display from aliexpress, a 5.8 inch 648x480 one that could do white/black/red with an SPI interface, then I wired that to an RP2040 board, then wrote a bit of circuitpython firmware for that which could receive commands over USB and draw stuff on the display.

I got as far as being able to send images to it, and writing a little host program on my PC that would do a partial screen update on a clock display and CPU/GPU temperatures once a minute, and draw a Mandelbrot set in the remaining space, with a full screen refresh every 15 minutes because it needed it, and a several minute “exercise” routine that would take every pixel from white to black to red and back to white at midnight, to improve screen appearance longer term.

And then I got bored/annoyed with it as the refresh was so slow (~30s for a red update) and the rp2040 needed me to manually press its reset button after every windows boot or the usb device wasn’t recognised. I thought about rewriting the firmware in C in case it was circuitpython that was flakey … but lost the impetus.

Re: $2 WeAct Display FS adds a 0.96-inch USB information display to your computer

#107

Post by croemer »

qmr wrote: post #59
amelius wrote: post #28

What was that extra bar of information called on Macbooks? Were they a success?

Absolutely despised that nonsense. Useless and no physical ESC for vim. It also wasn’t optional, if you wanted a higher spec’d MacBook it was coming with a touchbar. The keyboards of that era also had problems.

Ctrl+c is the same as ESC for vim and easier to type.

I remap Capslocks to ESC which is even easier.

Re: $2 WeAct Display FS adds a 0.96-inch USB information display to your computer

#108

Post by Too »

joshu wrote: post #106

we could end so much security pain by having a dedicated display for authentication. It’s not like a second display is very expensive anymore…

That's more or less what you get when enabling MFA with Authenticator on your iPhone.

Banking used to have dedicated dongles with displays before but now also changed to apps. Yubikeys don't seem to be as popular as they deserve. People simply want to carry less things around that can be lost and it's hard to beat the security/convenience ratio of Face ID.

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