turns out 60hz hi-dpi eink screens feel pretty magical

here’s a gameplay example of @dukope’s wonderful return of the obra dinn. clear ghosting here with high-contrast linework, but it has a real chalkboard feel.

this is the ED113TC1 powered by the @Modostech glider board. able to push this 2400×1032 panel at 60fps.

There's a sort of endearing retro sci fi vibe to the occasional flickering, and the lack of backlight makes it feel somehow more wholesome I'll take it

yeah! i’ve got plans for a pretty retro front light solution. the ghosting/refresh are all firmware defined and pretty tunable, along with dithering behaviour. excited to dig deeper!

Pretty awesome. Do you know how much this could accelerate e-ink screen degradation? Maybe I'm wrong, I'm thinking of old Kindles, which had a very high but limited number of full-page refreshes. I don't know if modern e-ink displays are still affected by that.

the tech here by @zephray_wenting is pretty crazy — rather than full screen refreshes, it uses a fpga to drive individual pixel voltage transitions. the full-screen flashes you see in the vid really aren’t necessary at all.

@zephray_wenting will obvs need to do long term testing, but it shouldn’t affect long-term screen health all that much

@zephray_wenting Individual pixel voltage!

Hot damn this has me all turned on. What is the shelf life of such a product? Would it survive 5 or 10 years of use? You've already explained the really cool tech a bit here: but curious how that translates into shelf life? Can't wait for e-ink to be everywhere.

i'm curious myself! will let you know how it goes, but i imagine it's on the order of years. the datasheet for this panel has plenty of info on temperature/drop/solar radiation reliability, but nothing on refresh. luckily the panels are fairly cheap (~$30).

@nicolasembleton I keep having this stupid idea of layering them If there was just a way to get c m y k It would make for a wicked solution

@nicolasembleton color eink is a thing, and it’s gotten pretty good with the latest spectra 6 panels! only issue is it’s very slow to update, like 5s per frame. hope there’s some progress here soon.

dream cyberdeck setup

there's a little preview of what's to come in the vid :)

The real question is what temps does it survive in? Most eink displays can’t operate over 45 c or below 0c from my experience, which is not great!

yeah, the effect of temperature on eink panels surprised me! i didn’t realise the waveform tables that drive these specify different voltage levels at different temps.

Crazy! I didn’t know that!

This would be amazing as a sketchbook

yeah, agreed! no digitiser on this panel, but lots of others that have them (and easy enough to place one on top)

the only thing is the blotching you get from motion is a bit distracting, not sure if thats an easy fix or just part of the technology

that keyboard is SICK. wtf is that.

thank you! custom ortho board i made, using kalih choc sunset switches. looking to make this into a mini laptop soon using that keyboard!

super nice. love me a split spacebar. Makes me hate my macbook sometimes lol

I'm so curious about the keyboard.

it's a prototype for a cyberdeck/writerdeck-ish thing i'm working on using this screen. went ortho to minimise width, but the ldsa caps and choc spacing are a little small for me. going to keep iterating!

thats beautiful

That is SO damn sexy - need to play with this more. I’d love to print some custom displays for obs for my homelab and AI projects!

Bullish on @FrameworkPuter here

@FrameworkPuter i’ve seen someone in the Modos discord finishing up a 13” enclosure for the framework. excited on the progress!

This is the exact panel we were looking at for exploring the Modos hardware stack. Looks fantastic!

seems like we’re on similar paths! excited to see what you end up putting together :)

I need this. What panel and driver board?

Awesome ortho keyboard ❤️

I will never stop rooting for e-ink displays

@luciascarlet @Stats_Sig

Thats awesome. I been wanting a e-ink monitor for a long time. Hopefully something affordable might be coming out soon.

modos have a full proper monitor up for pre-order now! more expensive than this demo setup, but far more full-featured

Is its energy consumption still good?

yeah, surprisingly good! averaging ~1W (5V @ 0.2A), which fits my needs perfectly for a battery powered device.

im going to need 12 of these on my wall to babysit my claude agents

Check out @daylightco.

@daylightco love the daylight folks! it’s a different screen tech (custom reflective lcd, more practical!), but same ethos.

@daylightco very cool!

I want it so bad

Ow imagine an desk with only the screen. Where you can take an pen and the start writing or drawing or what ever you want

I love this. I wish there were a nice color version of this. I built on inky e-ink, but the 10 second flickers can be distracting...

ええ、これはすごい。欲しいね。

I've dreamed of this scenario since the first time I saw eink.

@DanielleFong This has @MaximeRivest written all over it

What's the (p/d)pi? Kobo panels usually have 300 but from what I could find this has 230?

yeah, this sits at 230dpi, demo is running at native res in macos (2400x1032).

I dreamt we would have paper someday like this. Video would play on magazines, newspapers, and advertisements. In the paper. I’m quite sure this will come with essentially zero cost and be everywhere. That is if people can still read.

I love this. Imagining a newspaper-sized one in my diamond age neo-victorian future morning ritual

You’re on to something here

black on white looks great when it's not obnoxious backlight

Crap why are you making me add this to my growing list of projects

Wow, this looks beautiful!