I wonder what the current situation with e-ink is.
From my point of view,current e-ink displays have not really improved significantly in terms of resolution and refreshing speed. Where are the current difficulties with the technology?
I remember the difficulty of making larger, highly monodisperse SiO2/polymer particle spheres in the end of the 90s. But I believe this problem was overcome long ago.
So is it the electronic/particle interface that is problematic e.g. size of "pixels"/sphere clusters?
I think the real issue is there is an IP moat - Eink corporation was pretty much a monopoly which kept prices high and research and innovation spending low - but the patent has been partially annulled in Germany so there might be more innovation in that field coming soon
> Kudos to Trekstor to stand up for a fight, and thanks for the link.
I fear you may have misinterpreted that result. Trekstor doesn't make panels. They buy panels from OED Tech based in Shenzhen. OED Tech is actually a company started by former E Ink engineers who left Boston and moved to China. They were sued by E Ink because those guys just stole the chemical formulas and production processes. OED Tech even approached us (we buy E Ink panels) and promised to undercut their price.
Competition is good but I kind of prefer genuine competition. I had high hopes for interferometric but Qualcomm shut that down.
Competition is good but I kind of prefer genuine competition.
Except in the industries and product areas where IP is being used for land-grabs, rent-collection, little-to-none innovation and roadblocking any and all competition. In those cases (as E-Ink), I am glad there are still places in this world where people can continue to push the envelope and innovate to create better products for our species. IP be damned.
There are apparently already a bunch of small companies in China making EPDs (electrophoretic display, the "generic name" and associated components; E-Ink is just one company/trademark) so the end of the monopoly may be near, and prices may drop enough to make them as commonly available as LCDs.
I hope the IP ownership loosens sooner than later. The cost of e-ink is ridiculous. A few months ago I wanted to design a picture frame-sized dashboard suitable for wall mounting, but the prices are exorbitant. I can't feasibly afford to build such a display.
Resolution and refresh speed do not matter to me, as current models are already acceptable.
Yet a full A/4 size e-ink based "tablet" notepad with inking support would be nice, if would be available on affordable prices.
I know some products are available, yet they are way more expensive than useful. (I can have a laser printer for mere 100$ and print those few articles, for other stuff a Kindle for yet another 100$ is nice. This is my current setup.)
> e-ink displays have not really improved significantly in terms of resolution and refreshing speed.
When we started using E-Ink displays in 2010, we were getting 6" 800x600 panels. In 2017, we're using (standard, not top of the line) 1600x1200 6" panels with significantly better white. You can put the old and new panels side by side and see the difference. There's a wide variety of sizes. There's also the Spectra black,white+red displays which I haven't played with yet. http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/23/4358326/e-ink-spectra-colo...
Refresh speed. E-Ink panels don't need refresh. Update speed is a bit better. You can do animation. Yotaphone used that for mirroring the LCD on E-Ink. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZoTfd7MzKs
Does anyone know what device is used to change image on e-ink pricetags? I know that there are some wireless ones, but I imagine that wired should be cheaper and better for hacking.
Those pricetags are pretty cheap. And on Ali Express they sell those 3 color ones. Maybe it would be possible to use them to make some fun keyboard?
Recently, I tried to contact E-Ink, hoping to get information for an architectural use of some of their supposed products. I couldn't get any real information, conceptual pricing, development kit, summary of capabilities, or anything useful out of their sales staff. I repeatedly explained, I am a well capitalized entrepreneur wanting to incorporate some of their tech into my properties at scale, and that I have a development and construction team ready to work to design and integrate a product for various uses. I my mind, I should be a good potential tech development partner, ready to waste money on their tech. I couldn't get anything useful out of them. I am now convinced that outside of the very basic amazon kindle reader screen type displays, that the technology does not exist as promised or marketed.
I've had good experiences with a 10" eInk dev kit from Pervasive Displays, purchased from DigiKey. Looks like it's out of stock right now, but they've got a 7.4" and a 4.4" form factor in stock:
At the low level, it's pretty straightforward to work with their dev kits. A Raspberry Pi + some jumper cables + a bit of python gets things going.
There are some quirks, since for the most part the board is optimized for internal update speed, not for usability. I ended up putting together some code to update the display given a PNG file, including some basic dithering for greyscale. And I drive all that from screenshots of a browser running in a virtual X terminal on the RPi. The update speed is not the best (several seconds from screenshot to render), but that's fine for my use case, since I'm using it for slow-moving info (weather, bus schedule, tides, etc.) and I'm better at writing HTML+JS for UI than writing bitmaps.
If black/white isn't a core requirement look into BluBoard (bluboard.io). They are a Cleveland-based hardware startup that specializes in 18" epaper displays and related content management systems.
> They are a Cleveland-based hardware startup
> Disclaimer: I am the Director of Architecture at BluBoard
Then you should probably say "we are" rather than "they are" so that it's clear from the outset. (PS. When you disclose something, it's a "disclosure".)
It's not e-ink but we have a pretty cool (imho) "alternative" display that might be worth a look for one of your projects: https://breakfastny.com/flip-disc/
The moment I can buy an 8.5"x11" display I'll be happy with eink stuff. I'd probably build a Pi Zero E-Reader. Without 8.5"x11" paper there's no point for the kind of things I'd want to read.
For those who would just like to use an EPD of reasonable size and price, the "official" development kits etc. are extremely expensive (likely due to the IP/patents discussed in some of the comments here) but others have figured out how to drive the panels you can find cheaply as replacements for e-book readers:
In the usual applications these are driven by a dedicated controller (another big chunk of IP and thus $$), but it's easy enough to generate the signals with a regular microcontroller --- there's literally no minimum refresh rate, so the timing requirements are not high --- and it also gives you more control over the actual pixel whitening/darkening, allowing such things as grayscale and incremental updates:
What is the highest resolution non-color display? I.e. are there '4K' versions of things like e-ink? It seems like most of these things are sort of pixelated looking.
Are we looking at the same video? The video should be the Onyx BOOX Typewriter. It's the size of a tablet and a keyboard cover. It's a HUGE improvement over the last entry I saw in this space, the hemingwrite[0].
I suppose if they cut out the entire touchpad area to reduce the depth, and reshape the screen to size that would be the form-factor I'm looking for. Something between what they have done and the old PPC from HP: http://www.suddenlink.net/pages/curtismc/jornada.htm
Also I would very much prefer that there was no other software on the device. I have enough distractions as it is.
That said, I would probably still buy this if I could.
Ah, I see. I think your comment about 'Not something I would casually drop into my backpack' is what threw me. You want something you can slip into a pocket. I had an HP Jornada 680 and a Nokia N800 with a bluetooth keyboard back in the day. They weren't as useful as I would have liked. Editing even plain text prose was difficult.
Personally, I'd love a galaxy s8+ sized phone with an eink display, but I think the best I'm going to get is either a DPT-RP1 hacked to take a bluetooth keyboard or the good e-reader tablet. Then again, I prefer a full android operating system to a single app locked down model. Maybe you could convince the hemingwrite/freewrite people to come up with something a little more portable?
Yeah, Jornada 680 would be too small, hence why I said "between".
Imagine the baby macbook with it's touchpad area cut off. So basically just a keyboard and an equally-size ink screen on top of it. I can imagine myself going to the park near my house and writing prose sitting on the bench. Ain't happening with the laptop.
Does anybody think having a gigantic e-ink desktop monitor would be rad for coding? The refresh rate might be a killer, but I wonder how your eyes would feel after 8 hours compared to an conventional monitor.
You mean like the Dasung Paperlike[0]? Consensus from the writers I know is it's pretty awesome. Not a lot of programmers use them at this point because it's black and white, so there's no syntax highlighting. It's also powered and connected via USB, so there is a delay when typing fast that could drive some programmers crazy. It's about the same responsiveness as a regular monitor hooked up with a DVI to usb adapter.
I feel that the displays in the Pebble watches (ie Sharp's memory LCDs [1]) are a much better alternative to LCDs than e-ink. Their power consumption is in the uW range with more than 30fps refresh rate.
One of my favorite stories about genetic algorithms is how they made an e ink display work. Taken from a Stack Overflow thread:
>In January 2004, I was contacted by Philips New Display Technologies who were creating the electronics for the first ever commercial e-ink, the Sony Librie, who had only been released in Japan, years before Amazon Kindle and the others hit the market in US an Europe.
>The Philips engineers had a major problem. A few months before the product was supposed to hit the market, they were still getting ghosting on the screen when changing pages. The problem was the 200 drivers that were creating the electrostatic field. Each of these drivers had a certain voltage that had to be set right between zero and 1000 mV or something like this. But if you changed one of them, it would change everything.
>So optimizing each driver's voltage individually was out of the question. The number of possible combination of values was in billions,and it took about 1 minute for a special camera to evaluate a single combination. The engineers had tried many standard optimization techniques, but nothing would come close.
>The head engineer contacted me because I had previously released a Genetic Programming library to the open-source community. He asked if GP/GA's would help and if I could get involved. I did, and for about a month we worked together, me writing and tuning the GA library, on synthetic data, and him integrating it into their system. Then, one weekend they let it run live with the real thing.
>The following Monday I got these glowing emails from him and their hardware designer, about how nobody could believe the amazing results the GA found. This was it. Later that year the product hit the market.
>I didn't get paid one cent for it, but I got 'bragging' rights. They said from the begining they were already over budget, so I knew what the deal was before I started working on it. And it's a great story for applications of GAs. :)
52 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadNote that making a DIY LCD, on the other hand, seems fairly manageable: http://hackaday.com/2016/06/17/how-to-make-a-custom-lcd-from...
From my point of view,current e-ink displays have not really improved significantly in terms of resolution and refreshing speed. Where are the current difficulties with the technology?
I remember the difficulty of making larger, highly monodisperse SiO2/polymer particle spheres in the end of the 90s. But I believe this problem was overcome long ago.
So is it the electronic/particle interface that is problematic e.g. size of "pixels"/sphere clusters?
http://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2015/03/02/german-court-fin...
On the other hand, taken from the article: "overall quality of the screen wasn’t quite as good as E Ink, but it wasn’t very far off either".
I fear you may have misinterpreted that result. Trekstor doesn't make panels. They buy panels from OED Tech based in Shenzhen. OED Tech is actually a company started by former E Ink engineers who left Boston and moved to China. They were sued by E Ink because those guys just stole the chemical formulas and production processes. OED Tech even approached us (we buy E Ink panels) and promised to undercut their price.
Competition is good but I kind of prefer genuine competition. I had high hopes for interferometric but Qualcomm shut that down.
Except in the industries and product areas where IP is being used for land-grabs, rent-collection, little-to-none innovation and roadblocking any and all competition. In those cases (as E-Ink), I am glad there are still places in this world where people can continue to push the envelope and innovate to create better products for our species. IP be damned.
Yet a full A/4 size e-ink based "tablet" notepad with inking support would be nice, if would be available on affordable prices.
I know some products are available, yet they are way more expensive than useful. (I can have a laser printer for mere 100$ and print those few articles, for other stuff a Kindle for yet another 100$ is nice. This is my current setup.)
When we started using E-Ink displays in 2010, we were getting 6" 800x600 panels. In 2017, we're using (standard, not top of the line) 1600x1200 6" panels with significantly better white. You can put the old and new panels side by side and see the difference. There's a wide variety of sizes. There's also the Spectra black,white+red displays which I haven't played with yet. http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/23/4358326/e-ink-spectra-colo...
Refresh speed. E-Ink panels don't need refresh. Update speed is a bit better. You can do animation. Yotaphone used that for mirroring the LCD on E-Ink. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZoTfd7MzKs
Those pricetags are pretty cheap. And on Ali Express they sell those 3 color ones. Maybe it would be possible to use them to make some fun keyboard?
That said, I agree that it's silly and frustrating that you couldn't get anything out of someone whose job is sales for the company.
EDIT: Nevermind, all they offer currently are segmented displays (think calculator LCD style displays). That's crap.
https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/pervasive-displays... https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/pervasive-displays... https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/pervasive-displays...
There are some quirks, since for the most part the board is optimized for internal update speed, not for usability. I ended up putting together some code to update the display given a PNG file, including some basic dithering for greyscale. And I drive all that from screenshots of a browser running in a virtual X terminal on the RPi. The update speed is not the best (several seconds from screenshot to render), but that's fine for my use case, since I'm using it for slow-moving info (weather, bus schedule, tides, etc.) and I'm better at writing HTML+JS for UI than writing bitmaps.
Sources:
[1] CES News Story - https://bluboard.io/news/bluboard-at-ces-2017-with-fellow-cw...
[2] BluBoard Chooses Multitech - http://www.multitech.com/news-and-events/press-releases/lork...
[3] Local News Segment - http://www.cleveland19.com/story/34321031/cleveland-start-up...
Disclaimer: I am the Director of Architecture at BluBoard
Then you should probably say "we are" rather than "they are" so that it's clear from the outset. (PS. When you disclose something, it's a "disclosure".)
[0] https://getremarkable.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW9nB6SlsFU
http://m.good-display.com/products_list/&pmcId=160&productCa...
You can buy a demo kit which features a STM32F1 and source code. You can also buy individual screens.
I've messed around with the demo board a year or so ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14123060
http://essentialscrap.com/eink/
In the usual applications these are driven by a dedicated controller (another big chunk of IP and thus $$), but it's easy enough to generate the signals with a regular microcontroller --- there's literally no minimum refresh rate, so the timing requirements are not high --- and it also gives you more control over the actual pixel whitening/darkening, allowing such things as grayscale and incremental updates:
https://hackaday.io/project/11537-nekocal-an-e-ink-calender
What is the highest resolution non-color display? I.e. are there '4K' versions of things like e-ink? It seems like most of these things are sort of pixelated looking.
http://shopkits.eink.com/product/signage-evaluation-kit-v3-w...
a 9,7" netbook with an e-ink screen. Unfortunately not for sale yet AFAIK
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfbhcddyb8Q
I suppose if they cut out the entire touchpad area to reduce the depth, and reshape the screen to size that would be the form-factor I'm looking for. Something between what they have done and the old PPC from HP: http://www.suddenlink.net/pages/curtismc/jornada.htm
Also I would very much prefer that there was no other software on the device. I have enough distractions as it is.
That said, I would probably still buy this if I could.
Personally, I'd love a galaxy s8+ sized phone with an eink display, but I think the best I'm going to get is either a DPT-RP1 hacked to take a bluetooth keyboard or the good e-reader tablet. Then again, I prefer a full android operating system to a single app locked down model. Maybe you could convince the hemingwrite/freewrite people to come up with something a little more portable?
Imagine the baby macbook with it's touchpad area cut off. So basically just a keyboard and an equally-size ink screen on top of it. I can imagine myself going to the park near my house and writing prose sitting on the bench. Ain't happening with the laptop.
[0]: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/paperlike-world-s-first-e...
[1] https://www.sharpsma.com/products?sharpCategory=Memory%20LCD
I have one in a closet, somewhere.
>In January 2004, I was contacted by Philips New Display Technologies who were creating the electronics for the first ever commercial e-ink, the Sony Librie, who had only been released in Japan, years before Amazon Kindle and the others hit the market in US an Europe.
>The Philips engineers had a major problem. A few months before the product was supposed to hit the market, they were still getting ghosting on the screen when changing pages. The problem was the 200 drivers that were creating the electrostatic field. Each of these drivers had a certain voltage that had to be set right between zero and 1000 mV or something like this. But if you changed one of them, it would change everything.
>So optimizing each driver's voltage individually was out of the question. The number of possible combination of values was in billions,and it took about 1 minute for a special camera to evaluate a single combination. The engineers had tried many standard optimization techniques, but nothing would come close.
>The head engineer contacted me because I had previously released a Genetic Programming library to the open-source community. He asked if GP/GA's would help and if I could get involved. I did, and for about a month we worked together, me writing and tuning the GA library, on synthetic data, and him integrating it into their system. Then, one weekend they let it run live with the real thing.
>The following Monday I got these glowing emails from him and their hardware designer, about how nobody could believe the amazing results the GA found. This was it. Later that year the product hit the market.
>I didn't get paid one cent for it, but I got 'bragging' rights. They said from the begining they were already over budget, so I knew what the deal was before I started working on it. And it's a great story for applications of GAs. :)