For the longest while I wanted a portable e-ink display for outdoor use (just something good enough for terminal, text editing, maybe some light browsing), but sadly nothing ever really materialized. There are larger panels available 1 but require enough low level work that nothing's ever really materialized. There's one Chinese company that's shipping a 13.3' USB display ($1300 for the first gen 2 or $799 to pre-order a second-gen product 3) and surprisingly enough, 10' Pixel Qi screens are also being sold, with some support for about $400 4 or for about $150 from random Chinese retailers. 5 Currently, the easiest/most cost effective options for getting a large e-ink display showing content are either buying a used 9.7' Kindle DX (around $150-200) and hacking VNC onto it 6 or doing running VNC on the 13.3' Onyx BOOX MAX ($650, in short supply, it runs Android 4.0 and has wifi, BT and a pressure sensitive touchscreen/stylus so has some potential) 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7.
I wanted to create one of these out of a Kindle. The easiest way would be to display a custom page in the Kindle's browser and use the meta refresh property to reload the page periodically. This would not have good battery life.
A better way would be a custom program running on a kindle that would: enable the wifi, load the content to be displayed from a server as an image, disable wifi, save the image as a custom screensaver, turn off until it's time to redo it. The custom screensaver is displayed with the Kindle turned off, which would lead to very good battery life. There are people building custom firmwares for the kindle, I wonder how difficult it would be to code this. How easy (and expensive) is it to buy OEM displays?
E Ink Computer Screen
The products you sell look cool, but seem to cater for the commercial market with economy of scale. If I want to got to EINK and buy a 6' Spectra panel, is that even possible as a hobbyist? Plastic Logic look the same. If you look on Digikey, the best you can do is about 3-4 inches it seems. So for very simple stuff e.g. I want to add a basic non-volatile display to some sensor I've hooked up to a microcontroller, there aren't many easy options. Access to panels is possible, you just need to find the right distributor.
But getting the display is just a small part of the story. You need to build your driving electronics and figure out how to drive the display. 3-4 inches are also usually much simpler to drive, you can use a TCON and there's no waveform management, etc. The fact that this is much harder than it seems (hardware is non-mainstream, access to documentation is limited, support is very hard to get, displays need special driving chips) actually prompted us to provide a development platform for E Ink.
It took us years to figure everything out and for somebody wanting to prototype something this is a show stopper. As far as pricing goes, the 6' panels are priced approachable, while the large displays still need to hit the mass production price points. Obviously if you buy from us in bulk we can provide you much better pricing than a price for a development kit, but E Ink is not cheap.
I understand your frustration, I too just want access to decently priced, and various sizes of e-ink displays. From my time playing with the little adafruit displays, I also get where Visonect is coming from as a whole stack (hardware, controller, api, software) that makes it easier to just get up and going sounds pretty dang great. I think what it comes down to for me, is I am not buying a dev kit to get hooked into an ecosystem that I don't have really clear pricing on.
Which is really to bad. I think if you had a cheaper wifi only 6' model that people could afford to throw away money on just to test ideas out, then you would get way more people interested. Me too my friend, me too.
E-ink usage has been underwhelming/disappointing. When the technology was first announced I thought it would take the world by storm, but all we wound up with was eBook Readers and little else. I really hope that color is the missing piece of the pie, and we'll wind up with color e-ink photo frames, LCDs in adverts displaced by color e-ink, and even secondary screens which are e-ink based. It is such a cool technology, almost zero energy use between updates, that has been ignored and under-used. It legitimately makes me sad. I guess nobody wanted to be that 'dated' manufacturer who used a black & white screen on something in 2016, no matter what the benefits.
Even with color, it just won't be anywhere as good as the screens we're used to now. There are two things holding E-Ink back: 1) Battery life alone is not worth the tradeoff for the consumer market. 2) The flexibility of the form factor could've taken E-Ink places that others couldn't go, but: a. The company makes it very difficult for startups to work with them on non-stock sizes/shapes.
The manufacturing process hasn't improved enough to bring the promised cost within reach. All the R&D money in the display industry is being invested elsewhere, and people will get affordable, flexible, and high-contrast OLED screens sooner than E-Ink can check off two of those boxes.
Super neat stuff, looks like you guys have a solution that fills a big gap (the big disconnect is that you have hardware hackers who don't build up the stack or high level devs who have things they want to build but don't want to bring up panels to do it). What's the refresh rate/interactivity/frame rate for your devices?
Looks like you guys have lots of awesome options - are there videos of the devices in action or the dev environment? Are the high prices of devkits primarily driven by the panel cost or for other reasons?
Description Please note: If you need a replacement / extra screen they are. We have been working with Pervasive Displays to bring to market a Raspberry Pi ePaper HAT module, called the PaPiRus, that is capable of driving ePaper displays of various sizes with ease, making use of their existing open source RePaper codebase and examples. EPaper is a display technology that mimics the appearance of ink on paper. Unlike conventional displays, ePaper reflects light – just like ordinary paper – and is capable of holding text and images indefinitely, even without electricity. Because of this, ePaper displays and single board computers or microcontrollers are a match made in heaven as together they use a very small amount of power whilst still bringing a display to your project. We are very excited to offer this Raspberry Pi ePaper HAT compatible display breakout for hackers who want to start playing with small ePaper / eInk displays in their Raspberry Pi projects. Was originally launched on Kickstarter, and is now available to purchase!
The PCB assembly has a lot of driver circuitry required to keep the display running smoothly as well as an EEPROM for HAT compatibility and easy plug and play operation with the Raspberry Pi. All signals are broken out to a 40 pin female header. The display included in this offering is a 1.44″ diagonal and 128 x 96 resolution true ePaper / eInk graphical display.
These are intended for use as small dynamic signage in grocery stores since a barcode displayed on it can be scanned by a laser barcode-reader. The display does not require any power to keep the image and will stay ‘on’ without any power connection for many days before slowly fading. Of course, its also daylight readable and is very high contrast. This makes it excellent for data-logging applications, outdoor displays, or any other ultra-low power usages The good news is that rePaper/PDI have provided a suite of example code for the Raspberry Pi along with datasheets. Tons more information including wiring diagrams, datasheets & and links to example code!
Also, check out our eInk/ePaper display for the Software & Guides. Our software is open source and on. To get started with PaPiRus. PaPiRus is a Raspberry Pi ePaper / eInk screen HAT module with screens ranging from 1.44″ to 2.7″ in size. PaPiRus was originally launched on Kickstarter.
We have been working with Pervasive Displays to bring to market a HAT module for the Raspberry Pi that is capable of driving ePaper displays of various sizes with. PaPiRus is a Raspberry Pi ePaper / eInk screen HAT module with screens ranging from 1.44″ to 2.7″ in size. PaPiRus was originally launched on Kickstarter. We have been working with Pervasive Displays to bring to market a HAT module for the Raspberry Pi that is capable of driving ePaper displays of various sizes with. PaPiRus is a Raspberry Pi ePaper / eInk screen HAT module with screens ranging from 1.44″ to 2.7″ in size.
PaPiRus was originally launched on Kickstarter. We have been working with Pervasive Displays to bring to market a HAT module for the Raspberry Pi that is capable of driving ePaper displays of various sizes with Related products.