These projects have a pleasant "lo-fi zen" aspect that makes them attractive, I think. They are simple, provide value yet fade into the background without sucking your attention like some other gadgets.

It’s because it’s not lit. It looks natural, and unobtrusive.

I’d love to have this, art, and other “appliances” and slabs with eink. Ex. My todo list. My email etc.

I think they capture the feel of the black-and-white LCD digital watch world from before color display android everything ubiquity.

Probably that's why you can't make money on it at scale that you can with any addictive type of device and so it's not attractive for most entrepreneurs - a lot of work to put in and not enough money to even buy a Cessna.

I’m trying to make it work as a product. I tend agree it’s a super niche market though.

https://www.invisible-computers.com/

You should take a picture with better lighting. Really makes your product look bad on first impression.

Target the high-end? There might be a demand for a device with an e-ink esthetic which takes care of, I don't know, planning the days of rich people? An actual need instead of a manufactured want? Or maybe the lower power consumption of an e-ink display can make it useful in other areas not yet identified instead of consumer products?

I buy old kindles for this, ~50$ per piece. they have a linux os & battery included. you get in through a serial port and a password generated for your serial number. downside is that you fight the kindle os in certain aspects.

see for example: https://github.com/Neelakurinji123/kindle-weather-display

I wonder what it would take to build your own firmware image if you were reusing for exclusive alternative use? Presumably there is a Linux kernel tree somewhere and you could pull the waveforms from the Amazon image?

Check out http://fread.ink/

Tried that, but when I was at the process of soldering the cables to the debug ports, the "solder spots" came out of the board :(

Now I need to press hard with a needles to make the serial port work - so it is quite hard to setup - at least until I install sshd there and setup wifi to make it work wirelessly.

Do you have a list of compatible kindle models, and how to identify them?

I use most the paperwhite 2nd generation (212ppi resolution) as this had good availability and price. but the devices are quite hard to keep apart

the mobileread forum ist full of good information e.g.: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=267541

Check out the Inkplate - a great e-ink platform for all these projects and more:

https://inkplate.io/

Here's code that works with inkplate from a previous hn post :)

https://rahulrav.com/blog/e_ink_dashboard.html

Rahul got oauth2 flows working to get google calendar access.

Google Calendar provides a calendar URL which might be more convenient.

Used it in this thing: https://github.com/lawik/calendar_gadget

i bought the 6" display from eink.com to build a small personal art project - an infinite scrolling procedurally generated landscape based on this project - https://github.com/LingDong-/shan-shui-inf

A few gotchas:

1. some of these eink boards are hard to procure as a consumer. the vendors want you to be a company

2. the driver boards are purchased separately, are definitely required, and sometimes have windows software (vs easy to use rasp-pi drivers)

3. support is often difficult or from the OEM so english-language communication can be difficult.

I had the same idea a few weeks back. Until i tried it. the javascript there is VERY slow. on an overclocked r-pi zero in chrome it takes > 5 minutes to render one. A few min of r-pi 0 time (1.9W) will kill batteries fast...

This is very interesting. Do you have a write up on the procedurally generated landscape part?

It was posted recently, so there's some discussion here[1]

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23469233

A Raspberry Pi Zero and Pimoroni's Inky Impression are a very easy cheap setup to have a cute eink gizmo. Here's a twitter thread I posted with some images of it working: https://twitter.com/berenguel/status/1344016064196304899 and links to the screen as well.

I’m sorry to have to let you know your wallet may empty if you have not seen this already:

[edit: 4.7” ESP32 based epaper display with touchscreen, built in battery and expansion ports]

https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5paper-esp32-development-...

I scoured the wave share site for all the other e-ink screens and there're many cheaper ones.

You can get small e-ink screens (without a HAT, requires adapter ~10$ and dev board which is necessary anyway) for much cheaper.

5.8 inch is 40$

800×480, 7.5inch 50$

400x300, 4.2inch E-Ink raw display, three-color 26$

The cheaper ones are cheap because:

1) Each size comes in a low res and a high res variant, the low res ones are a lot cheaper

2) No HAT, so no built-in dev board for the PI. You do need to somehow connect it to your dev board. An adapter with SPI costs 10$, a dev board with esp8266 that has built-in adapter costs ~18$. Both are officially from wave share available on their site as well

3) All boards below 7 inch are relatively affordable. After that the price increases are huge

4) Not sure why, but price difference between black/white and 3-color is negligible. So feel free to pick a 5 inch tricolor screen for like 40$!

re: #4

Watch out for a few things:

1. Refreshes are much slower on 3-color eInk panels than on monochrome ones (eg: 20 sec vs 2)

2. Partial refresh on 3-color panels is rare and quickly gets messy around the edges. Partial refresh on monochrome panels is a relatively simple thing to do.

3. Greyscale on a 3-color eInk screen is VERY VERY VERY hard! Officially it is not supported at all. By any 3-color panel. I made it work [1] but even then, it is very very slow (bordering on a full minute per refresh).

4. Stock waveforms are rarely good. And almost no vendor will give you proper temp-compensated partial update waveforms. Developing your own waveforms for monochrome panels is easy and simple (~day). Developing your own waveforms for 3-color panels is a lot of work (~weeks + more weeks once you need to support more than just "21-25 celsius")

[1] http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=29.%20eInk%20Price%20Ta...

I’m waiting on the dev board they sell on waveshare. Definitely affordable under $20.

For this type of project the esp32 seems like the better choice than the pi zero.

There’s also the RP2040 if you want work in the pi ecosystem. Arduino and u-blox have those with wifi I think

This is incredible for something I have in mind. Going to do a bit more reading, but the price and size are ideal for my use case.

I think I know why these look so attractive:

e-ink is the perfect blend between technology (screen can display whatever you want) and the analogue/physical world (it looks like a piece of paper which you can put in a wooden frame and interact with).

Another example for me is the “Buddha Machine” by FM3 (https://www.fm3buddhamachine.com): it’s basically a box that plays some ambient loops (technology) but it looks like a small and unthreatening transistor radio with nice tactile buttons (physical).

This desktop dashboard with three analog panel meters is gorgeous:

Ambient Executive Dashboard | Uncrate https://uncrate.com/ambient-executive-dashboard/

A new version that uses WiFi instead of a defunct paging network would be nice.

Plans to mod original ones so the meters could be driven by a micro-controller or Raspberry Pi would be cool.

Here's one for $125 that I'd been planning on buying.

https://e-radionica.com/en/inkplate-29.html

The project, found on hn: https://rahulrav.com/blog/e_ink_dashboard.html

Agreed. I’m surprised the NYT won’t sell me an official version of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25063726

They are neat. It's not as much in your face as a normal display plus they require almost no power so you can do awesome things with a SBC or an Arduino, smb32 or something else if you really want to make something completely off the grid. The Denali is that eink displays are still insanely expensive compared to any other screen.

At the same time, disapointed reminder of the lack of the progress on cheap large eink displays.

For me it’s a cost issue, this is over $200… I might pay $100 for it, but this wouldn’t be a must-buy for me until it hits ~$50

This one might be cheaper: https://github.com/zephray/NekoCal

...from the same guy who did this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140284

I've been using another eink project dashboard, which cost me less as the screen is a smaller one, but it doesn't have colour: https://github.com/mendhak/waveshare-epaper-display