There's https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica/inkplate-6 in this vein already.
This looks great! Except that the sizes are not my favourite... a 6" one and a 9.7" one.. I think the ideal size for a small tablet/ebook reader is 8". Also I dislike the huge bezels of the devices, I wonder if it would be possible to make with minimal bezels.
Re:CutiePi – A Raspberry Pi 4 tablet
by solarkraft on Monday March 22, 2021 @06:17AM
(#26538819)
This is one of my main motivations. I also hate bezels. Unfortunately there's just no touch layer that would allow small ones :(
If you want an 8" device there's a fairly good market around 300€ already, with my favorite being the Kobo Forma and the Kindle Oasis also being worth a look (along with some others). Both have fairly small bezels on 3 sides and a thick one on one for holding.
My dream would look about like those devices, but yeah - the touch panel issue. I can't imagine a decent UX just based on buttons yet. One possible way forward is finding/making/retrofitting a reader app that is buttom navigable and maybe having a thinkpad nib as a fallback, but I'm not too sure about that since it'd compromise the UX fairly significantly, I'd say.
There is a new 8" tablet with e-reader and note taking capability with color e-ink from Onyx [1].
Re:CutiePi – A Raspberry Pi 4 tablet
by Abishek_Muthian on Sunday March 21, 2021 @01:41PM
(#26532242)
All the best with your endeavor, If it works out consider an external E-ink display for the next project as there's a needgap[1] for it.
[1] https://needgap.com/problems/43-affordable-e-ink-large-exter... (Disclaimer : It's my platform).
I would go with after market replacement parts for an existing tablet like
Most parts of the stack are conceptually figured out:
A Pine64 SOPINE module (comparable to the Raspi CM, but cheaper), a Linux DRM driver based on tinydrm (https://github.com/notro/tinydrm) or gud (https://github.com/notro/gud/), as panel driver either vroland's ESP32 based EPDiy (https://hackaday.io/project/168193-epdiy-976-e-paper-control...) or a custom FPGA solution.
What's really missing and I just can't figure out is how to get a touch input layer on there. Because the format is so weird there's just nothing available off the shelf at a fitting size. Cutting a larger one to size doesn't seem feasible (or is it?), perhaps the most DIYable would be an infrared solution like early kindles and old larger touch screens have, but on that topic there's a distinct lack of information (best I could find is this EEVblog video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnZ9KfJNjRQ).
A button-only navigation would really suck, since even KOReader (the absolute minimum application to run, preferable would be a full Wayland desktop) doesn't seem to be compatible with that.
I figure this is the best place to ask: Does anyone have an idea how this could be solved? Also, would anyone be interested in E-reader kits like that?