Someone would make a killing of they created an easy to use home dashboard with an eink display. Low power, 8x11, customizable with Android apps. Refreshes once a minute. Has weather and traffic and calendar in the morning, and displays photos in the afternoon.
LCDs are terrible in terms of power consumption. But a big, slow eink would be great.
Android eink tablets already exist, have done for years. It’s expensive and doesn’t work as well as you want. The eink company owns patents that keeps everything expensive.
See, I don’t want a tablet. Tablet implies fast refresh rates, minimal ghosting, fast processor, etc.
It’s a different purpose than a screen I can stick on a wall and only look at a few times in the morning. That lower quality on the panel and hardware should bring costs on the tech lower.
Hell, I don’t even really need 8 shades of color.
If someone can stick a low power processor on there and make it run on some rechargeable AAAs, even better.
It’s the display that is prohibitively and arbitrarily expensive. None of the other variables matter since all of the low power / retain image advantage is solely because of that display.
And large e-ink displays will remain niche, simply because of the company’s pricing.
I’m not so sure, I think it would go the way of smart speakers - a solution without much of a problem to solve
You say that as though people aren’t buying the shit out of them
I agree it’s kind of a dumb product, but people buy the shit out of smart speakers. Their market size in 2022 was 10.8 billion USD and rising every year.
I could absolutely see a consumer driven home wall panel selling like crazy - I have a HA driven wall panel at my house and every guest thinks it’s the coolest thing and asks where they can get one
Phones kind of suck for the ‘at a glance’ function.
- Widgets take up too much room on the home screen, so you have to swipe over to it to see it.
- once you’re there, you’re tempted to dive in to look at emails or tweets or whatever else. There’s a whole smartphone detox market that’s out there, focusing on dumb phones and escaping attention traps.
- Not everyone in the house (e.g., kids) should be looking at a phone regularly.
- I don’t have my phone with me when I’m walking back and forth getting ready. A quick glance is faster than a grab, unlock, swipe, read pattern.
Smart home dashboards also seem like a perfect fit with this. A low power, regular refreshing, touch sensitive controlled? That could hang on a wall with a battery? Sounds great.
I build a digital picture frame using an 8-color e-ink display and a pi pico.
It works great within its limitations, but the limitations are still pretty big
- 8 colors is pretty limited, especially when it’s a specific 8 colors (not just 8 max).
- Refresh times are slow
- The pico memory and storage are limited
- Due to the above, mine ran in two cycles with a reboot between to clear memory. One to pull images from my website and another to cycle through existing pictures until it needs to grab more
- Images needed to be converted to the appropriate size+ 8-color palette and dithered etc beforehand into a format the pico can read (hence then being on my website where they were reduced to an uncompressed palletized BMP)
Obviously a commercial product could probably do better, or a better screen, but faster-refresh or higher-color tends to jump in price quickly.
Still, it was pretty cool to have a device that would not need power to persist images, and used only a little during the process of loading new ones so could be powered by battery/solar
I’ve thought of doing something similar, the other fun part is that you could stash a big battery behind the display and run the E-ink on a super slow refresh rate since they only use power to refresh. I wish E-ink wasn’t so ridiculously expensive. This monitor would be perfect if it weren’t $1200.
You’re on the same wavelength as me. My ideal product is an e-ink display to stick in the kitchen or some other high traffic area to display relevant family information and with touch controls to do some fairly basic things like toggle digital switches/dials or just switch to alternative dashboards. If I could find a touch-enabled e-ink display that’s a good size but not stupid expensive (keeping in mind this is absolutely a luxury item so I’m not looking to shell out any significant volume of monies on the thing), I could attach one to a Pi and make one myself.
I think a 27x40 inch movie poster size would be awesome to line the walls of a home theater. Have posters on rotation. Similarly have some posted for artwork. Basically digital picture frames but not lcd/led driven. I’m sure the quality is low now, but once color accuracy is fine tuned, would be some cool niche uses.
I was just thinking the other day about using e-ink for a smart watch display.
