I guess it's just extremely hard to compete for a beachhead against an incumbent (mobile touch displays) that's more general and mass produced.
Once the patent expires I expect these to be used everywhere.
It sounds true but it is inaccurate. E-Ink doesn't even make the displays. They just make the material used in the displays. The actual displays are made by sandwiching the material on TFT and other parts. The displays are made by a whole bunch of different Taiwanese vendors like AU Optronics, and others and then there's a large ecosystem over laminating them with touchscreens, different types of protective hydrobarriers and other things. The reason the panels cost more than LCDs is because the volume is not high. Go ahead, make an order for 10 million panels and specify the price like apple does, and you'll find all these manufacturers jumping to increase their production scale in order to meet your target price.
> Once the patent expires I expect these to be used everywhere.
Again, this keeps getting repeated everywhere but it is totally wrong. There's a simple question you can ask. Which patent needs to expire? The lazy answer you'll get is all 700 patents. But in reality it is not a patent that is blocking things. It is simple. Money. Would you invest hundreds of millions needed in trying to scale, improve or invent a new display technology? Or would you invest in a hot new AI/ML startup? There's your answer. For further proof, google all the dead display startup companies, to show what's really blocking the world from having a great new display technology.
I love these “under engineered” solutions. I’d be tempted to do everything in the Kindle itself, but he achieved what he needed with much less effort and higher flexibility.
So, yeah, I appreciate it but it's not specifically innovative in this regard.
On the other hand HTML is nice because you could use the same code on two differently sized devices (to an extent).
The system consists of a set of shell scripts that run on a jailbroken Kindle. It includes ht, an HTTPie clone written in Rust that makes requests to a dashboard server using software like Dashbling.
I suppose you could just download the image and do a "diff -q" or compare an MD5 checksum, or even just file size.
Or use a different tool maybe? I see that rural supports head requests. https://crates.io/crates/rural
Edit: Appears that ht may be able to get response headers. It's sort of a documentation bug. It has a -p/--print option, but the README doesn't document what the arguments are.
Found it.. "ht -p h https://google.com" returns the headers, so you could extract the Etag or Last-Modified header.
If anyone knows an easy way to compile curl with statically linked openssl, let me know!
It would also not be difficult to build a small custom client based on Hyper or Reqwest.
Though I'm not sure if it would actually make a large difference with only 20 screen refreshes per day.
That's what we did on our boat:
Otherwise I currently do desktop notifications/speech text.
I have a basic Kindle too (paper?) And it's amazing the battery life.
The company M5 makes incredible gear for this. Their ESP32-Pico Atom chips are all I use.
I think I like normal LCDs for status displays. It is possible to redraw the screen without inverting it and drawing a lot of attention, so it is more "ambient".
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An issue with mobile UX is that it's tricky to maintain 'ambient awareness'. How do you 'keep an eye' on Slack? You have to foreground it & disable screen locking, or get push notifications.
On desktop you can just alt+tab to it every so often, plus the taskbar icon lights up.
I sometimes use Chrome on desktop to address a similar requirement (they have a feature to 'pin' a tab, so you can have GMail plus stuff like WhatsApp pinned.)
Would be cool if there was a cheap always-on tablet that could display arbitrary web widgets like a calendar, slack etc
Just thinking about this ambient computing thing reminds me of the ‘Chumby’, a cute smart alarm clock from the early 2000s.
Apparently the Amazon Echo Show is a bit of a successor. And I came across a wall-mounted calendar display called ‘Dakboard’ (it’s like $400 though.)
I have a use case that sounds ridiculously lazy, but I guess has been a problem for me for most of this decade: I need to know the time in various cities without doing any work besides a glance
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Addendum: over the last couple days I've been looking into stuff like Arduino, Raspberry Pi etc but re-using a Kindle is cool if you don't want to do a whole electronics project
So you could theoretically bind Slack status to a key (say your F1) key and have it turn red when there was an unread message.
I think that was/is a great solution to ambient awareness
You can do this with any $100 Android tablet or - to a lesser degree - a left-over iPad that's too old for anything relevant.
Software-wise you have a bunch of options: Magic Mirror and Home Assistant are the most common ones. Dakboard works as a SaaS solution without their custom hardware, the free option is way too limited. HA is more for home automation though and Magic Mirror's actual purpose is to mount the display behind a two-way mirror (thus the "Magic" part)
I've got a cheapo chinese dual boot Atom Windows/Android tablet mounted on my kitchen wall with an analog clock, our shared family calendar, Netatmo data (indoor+outdoor) and weather forecast. Works like a charm.
If it wasn't so crappy I could use something like Kiosk Browser[1] to have it use the front-facing camera and only turn the display on when it detects motion. Now I just use Tasker to turn the display off at night and dim it during evenings.
A bunch of people are just mounting old computer monitors on the wall and using a Rasperry Pi (Zero/2/3/4) as a kiosk-browser. The Wife Acceptance Factor is a bit lower on those though. Most likely you'd need to disassemble the display and add some fancy frames.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.ozerov.full...
I'm only letting it update during office hours, so I reckon I should get around a month of battery life with this usage.
There are some minor downsides though. If you keep the built-in Kindle UI running it will draw a menubar on the screen when the Wi-Fi connection status changes and power consumption will be a bit higher with this setup. All in all still a good tradeoff if you want to keep using the Kindle for it's original purpose too.
Edit: someone else posted a link to this tool which does exactly this: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=236104
The advantage of using a Kindle like this is that it's cheap enough that I don't have to use it for anything else. I bought the Kindle used for €25.
I've build a similar thing for my kindle.
https://github.com/makepanic/eink-weather
It is a simple website, which a headless chrome screenshots to use with the online screensaver app.
A browser might be overkill but I wanted to avoid manual layouting.
Is there a way to enable real-time messaging on to an e-ink device ? For e.g. I would love to keep a kindle running that can show a message when I am on the road.
FWIW the Kindle Paperwhite also has an Experimental "Beta Browser" that can display websites and execute some JavaScript - I am using that for a similar project, a basic dashboard / light switch web application hosted on a Raspberry Pi.
https://github.com/borzunov/remoteink
This could also be used for the dashboards if connected to a remote server or a Raspberry Pi (no screen updates happen if the content doesn't change).
Besides that, it allows to zoom in/out, switch between the opened windows, and move around the screen with keyboard shortcuts. No jailbreak is needed for the reader.
