You are correct, it is the equivalent of me as a display engineer coming here and saying "Cray computers has an active incentive to keep it out of consumer's hands" or alleging "Microsoft is blocking progress in the operating system industry using their patent". If you examine my comment history, you'll see I've tried repeatedly before on HN to explain why the physics of electrophoresis is the dominant limitation in the industry but that is apparently harder to understand and harder to accept, whereas people saying things like "the company behind the tech has an active incentive to keep it out of consumers' hands." or "the technology is locked by a company that doesn't innovate nor mass produce their tech. " without citations or any evidence is accepted as the gospel truth. :-)
Why they can't be a dollar or two more expensive and have better components, or why they can't just release the firmware source so people can improve it, I have no idea. I would almost say they are intentionally limiting it, but I've seen the same behavior from single-board-computer vendors, for example. It's really short sighted.
Isn't kindle firmware published open source? What is in this stuff that they provide? https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
Huh? What e-ink driver board? There's no such thing inside a Kindle. It is a straight NXP SoC that drives the e-ink panel directly. There is no MCU. The driver is open source. https://github.com/canselcik/libremarkable/blob/master/refer...
"Secret sauce that tells you how to drive the display cells"? You mean like a voltage table that is also present inside every LCD or OLED? The difference would be that the electrophoretic display would need a much bigger table so it would have to be kept on the SoC since it can't possibly fit into a single voltage driver circuit. That's not software, that's just a big table of voltages that's hardcoded for each unique panel. Is that what you think is "secret sauce"? Do you also want to extract that table inside each LCD drive circuit as well? I guess you could use it to make your LCD or OLED panel show brighter colors but at the risk of burning and damaging the crystals. I imagine the same risk would also be true for electrophoretic panels or anything where you can change the physical voltage that is being applied to the material.
Just curious, I previously saw claims on HN that E-Ink is a very brutal cruel company that is evil and attacks everybody. That didn't line up with how their staff, at least the materials science guys, seemed to be when I encountered them at SID. I've been asking for evidence for this on HN. Did they try to take down your tool or anything like that?
In hobbyist displays, the tables are very simple, and I'm pretty sure this is one source of quality differences.
I have no idea what you mean by "refresh so much faster and better" or what an "eink hobby display" is. To me, you can buy the same panel Kindle uses on the market and you can drive it with various different controllers and the "update latency" (electrophoretic panels don't refresh) will be different.
I don't necessarily mean to imply that the military is restricting the tech for competitive reasons; but rather just that E Ink Corporation might be price-anchoring relative to what their biggest customer is willing to pay.
(See also: why "holographic glitter" is so expensive, compared to other metallic glitters. Holo-glitter paint is an effective radar diffuser; and, more obviously, the glitter itself is literally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_(countermeasure) !)
EInk has a refresh time. Which is a significant mismatch to the flight speed of devices which seek to mask themselves against changing background. More to the point, optical detection is the least worry in this space. by the time it's visible in motion, its already a problem. '
For on-the-ground, its easier to put it under a canopy.
EInk does nothing for radar, or thermal imaging. So your proposed conspiracy is to defeat human eyes, which rarely if ever are the first-spotters. The circumstances where using radar breaches your own privacy are understood. I would expect an ML vision system could defeat this anyway. (and I say that as a bit of a long-term non-believer in AI)
I love a good conspiracy, but alas, I think this isn't it. The grassy knoll is just, after all, a patch of grass, and not an EInk facsimile, in my personal opinion.
(Admittedly, I was being a bit silly with the missile use-case.)
I occasionally see referrals in flow text to a Chinese claim they invented "holographic quantum" radar and can see all current stealth low echo aircraft and subs. I suspect it's bullshit but in war, if stealth was a purturbation, and deep water subs a more historical perturbation toward MAD and now, this is another perturbation much as drones have altered the symmetry for tank and mechanised ground warfare.. "shrug"
would be largely worthless as visual isn't really the primary way we detect and destroy aircraft anymore.