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Displays

DIY Electronic Paper Display 208

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the expensive-developer-toys dept.
An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices.com has an article about a development kit for prototyping device displays based on electronic paper technology. The kit includes a 170dpi, 6-inch (diagonal) SVGA (800 x 600) EPD (electronic paper display) module supporting four shades of gray, and a small computer module that runs the display. EPDs provide bright, high-contrast, thin, lightweight displays that remain legible under 'any lighting condition' -- much like newsprint. Once an image has been 'printed,' no power is needed to hold it."
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DIY Electronic Paper Display More

DIY Electronic Paper Display

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  • More Time (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kawahee ( 901497 ) on Wednesday September 28, 2005 @08:06AM (#13665749) Homepage Journal
    At the moment, I wouldn't rush out to build this. What I am doing, is waiting for somebody in the community to make it, break it, fiddle with it and make it better and higher res. I'd really like to see contributions to E-Ink and the other digital paper methods come from the online community, and I'd really like to see myself using this technology too.

    What comes to my mind is placing the paper in an 'in' tray and having it have the next item of business printed onto it.

    • Re:More Time (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Gordonjcp ( 186804 ) on Wednesday September 28, 2005 @08:18AM (#13665803) Homepage
      At the moment, I wouldn't rush out to build this. What I am doing, is waiting for somebody in the community to make it, break it, fiddle with it and make it better and higher res


      Yes, I'm not going to rush out either. Neither is anyone else. But it does seem to be taking a long time for somebody to make it, break it and fiddle with it. Wonder why?

    • Slashdot article title once again bogus (Score:5, Insightful)

      by typical ( 886006 ) on Wednesday September 28, 2005 @09:01AM (#13665999) Journal
      As usual, Slashdot manages to link to a vaguely interesting article and be completely incorrect and misleading in the title and summary.

      This is *not* intended to be built by you, the hobbyist -- it is no "DIY" kit.

      This is intended for people like Sony who want to be selling products based on this in a year or so. For them, $3k is more than reasonable, and not particularly out of line with the dev kits for many more mundane systems.

      What is cool about this from the Slashdot reader's standpoint is that:

      (a) It runs Linux. Linux is becoming dominant in the embedded world. Why not? It's flexible, there are no licensing fees, it's quite powerful, it's very well tested, and there is a huge pool of application developers available to hire from when you need to write your apps. The only drawback over a custom OS is memory usage -- but, hell, memory is getting cheaper every day, and for a high-end embedded device, it's not a big chunk of the cost.

      (b) With any luck, it means that companies will start shipping e-paper products within two years or so. The last crop of "ebook readers" pretty much failed, which I think is too bad -- too expensive, and people didn't like the DRM. Perhaps the lower battery requirements of e-paper will make it feasible.

      (c) The display drivers are open source. The concept of making drivers open source, the idea that it's valuable to avoid being stuck with hardware in your product that has NDA requirements, may be spreading. Maybe not. It still makes me hopeful.

      • This is *not* intended to be built by you, the hobbyist -- it is no "DIY" kit.

        This is intended for people like Sony who want to be selling products based on this in a year or so. For them, $3k is more than reasonable, and not particularly out of line with the dev kits for many more mundane systems.

        I agree, but that begs the question...why did they include an order form and why do they accept credit cards? IANA marketer, but I thought that a technology that somebody expects to sell to the likes of Sony, gene

        • Corporate credit cards aren't just for personal travel expenses, they are frequently used when dealing with new suppliers, with infrequent suppliers, and with suppliers that aren't set up to use corporate purchase orders. It is likely that there are a lot of firms with engineers that can put $3000 on their corporate card at the engineer's discression.

  • It took them long enough (Score:5, Informative)

    by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <akaimbatman@gmaYEATSil.com minus poet> on Wednesday September 28, 2005 @08:07AM (#13665755) Homepage Journal
    I don't know about anyone else, but I've been looking for a dev kit like this forever. Even just as an E-Reader (what the dev kit is preconfigured for) the possibilities are tremendous!

    I'm a bit annoyed that it's taken 30 years since Xerox first developed the idea, but at least it's here now. Just imagine if this technology catches on. No more need for paperback books (you can keep all the latest on your pocket reader), technical books can finally be portable now that page graphics can be shown in detail, and eye strain will reduce considerably as your eyes can lock onto something that's actually there rather than simulated by a beam of light.

    • Re:It took them long enough (Score:5, Informative)

      by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <akaimbatman@gmaYEATSil.com minus poet> on Wednesday September 28, 2005 @08:11AM (#13665773) Homepage Journal
      Just to add to my post...

      GOOD GRAVY THIS SUCKER IS EXPENSIVE! 3,000 for a DEV BOARD? Maybe if eInk thought about pricing a more reasonable dev board, they could get more hobbyists onboard. More hobbyists == more market experience. More market experience == more products made. More products made == more $$$ for eInk.

      Cripes, you'd think didn't actually want people to use these things.
      • Sad to say, I suspect that they don't care in the least about hobbyists. They want to sell to PDA/ebook/mobile phone manufacturers. They would hope to sell a couple of hundred to this market in the hope that one of their customers will make a popular product and order several thousand of the screen (without the devkit) later on.
        • Lordy... I expected something like $1000 or so- that's typically what an engineering prototype costs you if you're not getting one gratis from the manufacturer. A gumstix isn't THAT expensive. That E-Ink panel can't be THAT expensive.

          $3000 is pretty steep for what we're seeing here. I'd have difficulty signing off on something like this
          if Coollogic were still 100% in that space... That thing's just too damn expensive for words right now.
          • They don't yet have a plant that has been turning out thousands of these a day for three years. They don't yet have a well-defined supply chain for whatever it is that these E-ink things are made of. They don't have any of the economies-of-scale that make things cheap.

            $3000 is a lot to spend on a prototype. But it's cheap considering how new this is. Consider trying to buy an IBM PC motherboard and 640K of RAM in 1977. Check out the Heathkit (sob) catalogs of the era and see what new things really cost. A
            • $3000 is a lot to spend on a prototype. But it's cheap considering how new this is. Consider trying to buy an IBM PC motherboard and 640K of RAM in 1977.

              You're comparing Apples to Potatos. An IBM PC Motherboard in 1977 was still a highly advanced computer board with thousands of dollars in off the shelf, but still very expensive components. The retail price for one of those things was in the range of $2500. Considering that mass production always costs less, is there any wonder that the dev boards were more
      • GOOD GRAVY THIS SUCKER IS EXPENSIVE!

        Maybe this sucker is nuclear? [imdb.com]

        Sorry, couldn't resist.

      • Re:It took them long enough (Score:5, Insightful)

        by porksoda ( 253218 ) on Wednesday September 28, 2005 @08:34AM (#13665876) Homepage
        3,000 for a DEV BOARD?

        I would think so, considering there's no infrastructure in place to mass-manufacture these things for low cost, hence there's a very limited number of them in the world at the moment. The price will remain obscene until the R&D department is paid off no doubt.

        Shitty resolution or not, I think this epaper hooked up to phone concept has serious potential, and I doubt these types of things will be rare 10 years from now.
      • Yeah, $3000 for a Dev board.

        And no doubt, the production Ebooks out there are pretty darn expensive too, and will be for a couple years.

        But hell, if you want to slap together a startup, and have a small, dedicated team work on this sort of technology for a couple years, building and field testing some supercool apps, and learning _now_ how to harness the idiosyncrasies of the hardware, $3000 a pop is cheap.

        Of course, if you're serious about a startup, you'd probly go out and get your own gumstix.

        Or if

      • Re:It took them long enough (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Erwos ( 553607 ) on Wednesday September 28, 2005 @09:44AM (#13666315)
        Welcome to the real world, where you actually have to spend money on cutting edge technology. $3000 sounds cheap for a company that's actually going to make a product. Certainly, if we had a product that needed eInk, we'd pay the expense without hesitation.

        What's that? You're _not_ making a product, and you just want to screw around with it? Well, guess what? They're looking to stay in business, and you don't do that by selling way under cost to a bunch of guys who are never going to deliver those huge-quantity orders that eInk needs to stay in business. You do it by selling to people who are actually going to make a product out of it.

        As for a "more reasonable dev board", they're using a Gumstix, which is an off-the-shelf component. It should be pretty obvious to anyone with half a brain that the majority of the costs here are either in the display or the R&D.

        -Erwos
        • I hate to break it to you, but in the "real world", an inexpensive dev board can become a product unto itself. Take the Spartan 3 Dev Kit [xilinx.com] for example. It costs $99. (Which is actually incredibly cheap for a dev board.) Xilinx probably moves thousands of these kits, making the venture actually profitable. While many of their customers may be hobbyists, those hobbyists will remember the inexpensive Xilinx solutions and recommend those for their day job. Even if they do it only as amatuers and never expect to
          • Your analysis is spot-on. Look at http://www.seetron.com./ [www.seetron.com] They look like hobbyist boards, and they're priced at hobbyist prices. BUT they make a lot more money on the OEM market where presumably they get a discount, but it's not a big discount because the one-off price has a very low margin.

            Okay, so they're shipping this eval board in a basically usable condition, but without a case. The lack of a case means that they won't be competing with any of their customers. So they really *could* charge a re
        • As a CTO of a company, I'm here to tell you that you're wrong on that.

          Unless that is going to be part of your main product, $3000, especially for a smaller company
          (i.e. Anyone OTHER than Sharp, Epson, IBM, etc...), is WAAAAY too much money to be spending on something that
          is still almost not out of the labs. Unless I can see guarantees of something on the order of $100-300 on an
          800x600 monochrome panel that size, it's not going to even be given a moment's thought. Honestly.
          You can get LCD panels for abou
        • As for a "more reasonable dev board", they're using a Gumstix, which is an off-the-shelf component. It should be pretty obvious to anyone with half a brain that the majority of the costs here are either in the display or the R&D.

          If so, note that they'd be unwise to try to recoup R&D costs from dev channels. Display costs, yes, but R&D costs get distributed over the (eventual) user base, which they want to have be as large as possible, which means they want to sell to devs just at materials c

      • The Gumstix they're bundling retails for no more than $250. What is that thing made out of? Diamond?

        I'd have difficulty signing off on something like this as an Engineering eval set, even IF my company,
        Coollogic, were still 100% in this space. As much as I'm VERY interested in developing things around
        the tech, I can't see me spending $3000 as an early adopter for a touch-panel UI device tech. I mean,
        I might do it, but that price tag gives me pause. That's a damn workstation for an employee,
        folks- or tw
        • The Gumstix they're bundling retails for no more than $250. What is that thing made out of? Diamond?

          Amen. $3000 just isn't reasonable. I could grab all the parts from Digikey, design my own board for printing on Pad2Pad, pay for someone else to assemble/test it, and I'd STILL have at least $2000 in my pocket! They can't believe that anyone is going to think this device is cost effective when we can't even afford the dev board. :-/

          P.S. Your Journal entries expire after a few days. No one can post there anym
      • They are looking for the one company that can get 1 million+ of these into the market quickly. Hobbyists and sub 100 thousand copy apps are unlikely to even be worth considering. The problem comes in the need to build a manufacturing facility to handle millions of these things in order finally recoup development and make costs reasonable. You can't finance such an operation through hobbyist ideas. You have to have solid big business partners with dead on, low risk, mass market applications.

  • $3000.00 (Score:4, Informative)

    by Rick Richardson ( 87058 ) on Wednesday September 28, 2005 @08:14AM (#13665783) Homepage
    $3000.00
    • I have seen chip sets that cost 8$, but the dev kit is $120. Quit expensive. I am guessing that an e-ink interface is less than $1k in quantity. But that is still expensive.

  • LibriE electronic book (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bemmu ( 42122 ) <{if.atu} {ta} {esimol}> on Wednesday September 28, 2005 @08:18AM (#13665802) Homepage Journal
    I have used the LibriE electronic book mentioned in the article, which is available in Japan. I felt that it was an adequate replacement for a book, with an easily readable screen. Changing the page had some delay, but on the other hand so does changing the page of a real book. I imagine that the target audience of this are people wishing to read books on crowded Tokyo trains. Since less space is required this could be a good book replacement, after the cost comes down a bit. Biggest problem for their target group surely must be reading newspapers on the train, since they require a lot of space to open. It would be nice to see them provide newspapers for easy download to these devices.
  • I know this is supposed to be great technology -- basically, like paper, not a stupid LCD. Easier on the eyes.

    And yet, when I looked at the photo, I thought -- hey, that looks like crap. I don't want that. Stay away, UGLY!

    What gives? Does the E-ink display really look so bad? Or is it just a bad photo for the dev kit?

    Here's a typical product that looks way more appealing:
    http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B0007Y79B2.01._S CLZZZZZZZ_.jpg [amazon.com]
    • No comment on the eInk displays looking good or not (although if you have photoshop, you can print some text at 170 dpi 2-bit to simulate the resolution and color depth in the specs) however I think the nano pic you linked has a simulated image on the screen. In fact, if you look at the product shot on the side of an iPod box, you'll see that the display is rendered at the print resoluation (probably 600 dpi) with a disclaimer indicating that the image is in fact "simulated"

    • Re:Supposed to be good -- but what's that photo? (Score:4, Informative)

      by barawn ( 25691 ) on Wednesday September 28, 2005 @09:39AM (#13666276) Homepage
      What gives? Does the E-ink display really look so bad? Or is it just a bad photo for the dev kit?

      There are a few advantages of E-ink displays over other displays, and unfortunately they're not going to really be visible in a picture. The first is contrast: the contrast can be made very, very good since the ink can be very dark, and the background very light. Much, much higher than LCDs.

      The second is no backlighting. Now, this might not sound all that useful, because the first-generation GBA wasn't backlit, and that wasn't all that good, but E-ink's contrast is high enough that you don't need a backlight. Even just a small reading lamp is going to be easily enough to read by. This is the "easier on the eyes" part, and it's the one thing that current displays can't really compete with.

      The third is battery life: since you don't need power to maintain the display, only to change it, the battery life is going to be measured in pages, not in time. For an e-book reader, this is perfect, because you can take as long as you want to read it. I wouldn't be surprised if a production e-book reader based on e-ink only turned on whenever you pushed a button.

      There are other benefits (resolution's a biggie, but it doesn't look that great with this model, plus it's an image that's actually there, which means that it'll look good in all lighting and all angles) but I think those three are probably the biggest for the current generation.

      The biggest limitation to E-ink right now is its refresh time (~ of order a second per page, or 1 fps) and its cost. But still, it's the only product which really has specifications which seriously compete with paper.
    • That looks a lot like the display was photoshopped in.
  • I can finally upgrade the second oldest technology I own - Paper.

    Now all I need is a spoon with a laser level in it.

  • Would love to throw $3000 to get one of these kits (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tod_miller ( 792541 ) on Wednesday September 28, 2005 @08:23AM (#13665827) Journal
    I would love to make a bluetooth screen detach for my PDA... I wonder what the pixel refresh is like, can it scroll text or page it?

    I am loving the idea of a simple light weight newspaper that can talk to my PC or PDA (or TV, via PC tv card, capture the captions, and place them on here... or something.. or show tv guide..)

    I wonder if it is a cold screen too, something compfortable about that...

    So many possibilities, so little time.

    bah
    • I wonder what the pixel refresh is like, can it scroll text or page it?

      Wonder no more. From the spec:
      2 bit refresh (grayscale): 1000mS
      1 bit refresh (B&W): 500mS

      So no, you can't scroll. Further it takes a peak of 1800mW (760mW average) during the active portion of the refresh. This is an average current of 230mA during refresh (3.3v supply) with a peak of 545mA. Most rechargable cells will be fine with that - it's not a good load for AAA non-rechargable cells, nervermind watch batteries. Pe
    • No you can't (realistically) scroll text. it takes a whole second to draw the draw the screen. ;)

  • news? (Score:4, Informative)

    by roman_mir ( 125474 ) on Wednesday September 28, 2005 @08:31AM (#13665861) Homepage Journal
    I've been following e-ink for at least 4 years now. This kit is not new, it has been around for at least 2 years. How is this news?

    --

    Then again. It's not news until it's on /.

    twice.
    • Maybe if you had submitted the story, we wouldn't be reading about it now... ;-)

      ... but then, this is /.; we probably would be reading about it now (and again in the near future).

  • It's a PDA! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TheLoneCabbage ( 323135 ) on Wednesday September 28, 2005 @08:34AM (#13665878) Homepage
    This is the PDA every linux user (or maybe just me) has ever wanted. High rez, low power consuption, nice size, simple CPU. Open API. Who cares if it only has 4 levels of gray, that's all you need if your planning on doing work.

    And these people think they need to sell it as a dev kit? It's a product already, just give it a shell.

    On the other hand... $3000? Is that Canadian money?

    • You do of course realize that the Canadian dollar has risen nearly 30% (and rising - its now $.84) against the Greenback since Bush took office don't you?

      Further, since we are running a budget surplus and you a massive deficit this trend will continue. Eventually we will get back to point where we make fun of the US dollar being smaller (it was back in the 60's). :)

    • Re:It's a PDA! (Score:4, Funny)

      by lobsterGun ( 415085 ) on Wednesday September 28, 2005 @12:17PM (#13667671)
      I was hoping it was in yen...

  • Nifty, but.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by photon317 ( 208409 ) on Wednesday September 28, 2005 @08:39AM (#13665893)

    I'd hardly call it a "DIY" kit at a cost of $3,000. And it's not shipping for at least another month. And judging by thier screenshots, even simple fonts look fairly crappy at this resolution and only 4-level grayscale. If it were $150 I'd consider it for a home project. If it were $1,000 for the devkit with a promised volume price of under $100, I might consider developing a product with it, if I already had a great idea that I was fairly confident of. But for $3,000, who's buying this first-gen technology devkit with unknown technological future and unknown (but probably high given the devkit cost) pricing?

  • But... (Score:3, Funny)

    by TheRealSync ( 701599 ) on Wednesday September 28, 2005 @08:43AM (#13665906)
    ...does it run Windows?
    • It runs linux, but it probably could run Windows CE, opps, Windows Mobile .Net. I don't think there are any display drivers yet for eInk displays, so you would have to deal with using an operating system meant to run in color on a display with a 25ms response rate on a 4 color screen with a 1000ms response rate. Other than that, the dev board is a standard dev board you can buy elsewhere rather cheap, with an ARM processor, the same basic device in every Windows Mobile or Pocket PC PDA made in the last 4

  • so are you an early adopter? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mrthoughtful ( 466814 ) on Wednesday September 28, 2005 @08:53AM (#13665944) Journal
    $3000 for a 800x600 B/W screen (four levels of gray)
    Takes me back about 25 years.
    Fair enough that it is new technology - but I guess this is for lab testing only. Unless you are a real early adopter nut!
  • Well, I suppose when they sink >$100m of VC money into this business, they eventually have to start showing some revenue. With $3000 development kits. Boy, I'm impressed!

    LOL

  • Missing the point... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by penguin_strut ( 751980 ) on Wednesday September 28, 2005 @09:56AM (#13666434)
    People complaining about the greyscale and 'lack' of other various ding-dongs and features have got it all wrong. If you wanna play Doom3, you'll need a laptop (or better yet, a desktop :P). If you wanna watch movies, the same thing goes, or one of the many portable movie players now available. These devices are not FOR that kind of thing.

    The point is that reading text in notepad or from a pdf file should NOT require my laptop to be plugging along, wasting precious battery life on ubiquitous yet completely unimportant colors and movement. It's text. E-paper will open up a VAST new range of functionality, AND people seem to be forgetting that it is viewable from all angles, can (eventually) be rolled or scrolled up when not in use, and (perhaps most importantly) combats the horrible eyestrain that comes from attempting to read a full-text novel on an lcd screen. This is basically solid-state text, a book that's only one page long yet contains all the works of Tolstoy. Haven't you been lusting for this forever? Its the future, people! How long before these things are equipped with Wi-Fi, and can download the day's New York Times automatically and without the environmental and industrial cost of millions of wasted sheets of paper? How long before you're checking your email in a format that's actually READABLE at small screen sizes? How long before e-paper ASCII porn becomes the bee's knees? :P

    Also, its important to note that in those other towering industrial countries (ahem, you know, OUTSIDE of the US, where we got so much of our tech to begin with), small one-application devices are MUCH more common than full-out computers for the user-on-the-go. Considering that our cell phones can do basically anything BUT display readable text, having a device that can fill that gap is beautiful. And speaking of cell phones, I'd gladly go to a monochrome e-paper display for a phone that would last me 50hrs on a charged battery...while you're clapping all 'special-needs' at your 16-kajillion color screen for the first 5 hours of the road trip, I'll be functional till we're back home. All of this goes to combat the rediculous bass-ackwards element of high-end technology - that the simple things are many times as difficult and power-consuming as the complex.

    We look at technology right now in terms of best and brightest. But e-paper is a tremendous step towards what technology WILL be - an integrated, scalable, and subtle extension of our biological lives. I have NO doubt that we've got a humanistic renaissance coming up in a few years here, and we'll look back on widescreen displays and "gotta-have-it" superficial devices in the same way we shake our heads at the oily, pastelled veneer of the 80's. When technology TRULY becomes a part of our lives, when function overtakes form, wasting timeenergymoney so that we can watch Scary Movie between classes is going to seem pretty sophomoric, yes?

    ...and making ebooks more popular will have resonating effects on the all-important world of copyright, so even you color-luvin' movie fetishists should take note.

  • Wow - I just had this realization: One should be able to photocopy anything displayed on any of these "electronic paper displays". I'm not entirely sure why anyone would want to, given that the data is already in nice, easily-copyable digital form anyway. But, given that you can't photocopy current computer displays (well, not in the normal sense - there's always PrintScreen->Photoshop), this seems like an interesting new development.

    Is there a security risk here? You can put a TPM/DRM/copy-protect c
  • anyone want to back me for 30%?

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