> E-ink screens are quite power hungry when it comes to peak current. Modern high-resolution panels can consume >20 W peak.
This is where I was wondering and yeah, 20+W is pretty hefty to support a relatively small 8" EInk screen or something.
All those updates cost all that power as long as updates are occurring. Maybe you can optimize many of them away (if some parts of the screen don't move, especially if software was rewritten to optimize for the display).
More importantly, it sounds like you've created a full custom FPGA controller over the voltages that go into an EInk display? That's impressive in its own right even if I don't think 75Hz is a good idea lol.
--------
FPGA or Full Blown Microprocessor are the only choices here. A high power SIMD/NEON arm64 probably could do the job, but I think the Spartan6 is a good choice as well and has more obvious and straightforward parallelism (and probably all the pins required to control the screen. Even a big microprocessor won't have as many low latency pins as an FPGA).
Yes, that’s definitely something we want to work toward. As the community grows, we hope to tackle these kinds of optimizations together.
> A high power SIMD/NEON arm64 probably could do the job, but I think the Spartan6 is a good choice as well and has more obvious and straightforward parallelism
Yes, precisely for the reasons you stated. We also talk more about it below:
- https://www.youtube.com/live/okjJURIejIY
- https://github.com/Modos-Labs/Glider?tab=readme-ov-file#desi...
We personally couldn't make it work with low power but this seems promising!
> “Traditionally, the [e-paper display] controller used a single-state machine to control the entire panel, with only two states: static and updating,” says Modos cofounder Wenting Zhang. “Caster treats each pixel individually rather than as a whole panel, which allows localized control on the pixels.”
So in practice would it ever actually hit 20W unless you're doing something that requires constantly updating the whole screen, like playing a video game or watching a video? Surely updating only a few pixels at a time can't be that power hungry, right?
https://www.crowdsupply.com/modos-tech/modos-paper-monitor/u...