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A comment on Building a simple e-ink display from scratch. Parent comment

Re:Building a simple e-ink display from scratch by falcolas on Sunday April 16, 2017 @09:39AM (#14125739)
It's been awhile, but I have seen some basic e-ink displays for sale on DigiKey.

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.

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Re:Building a simple e-ink display from scratch by pcl on Sunday April 16, 2017 @10:55AM (#14126012)
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:

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...

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Re:Building a simple e-ink display from scratch by DenisM on Sunday April 16, 2017 @12:53PM (#14126397)
How do you program this? Is it easy to get started with?
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Re:Building a simple e-ink display from scratch by pcl on Sunday April 16, 2017 @01:19PM (#14126500)
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.

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