It looks amazing for e-ink. You'd probably don't want this for video anyway, besides it's not even in color. I'm impressed that it works at all. For a lot of work though it could be amazing, depending on your environment.

Say you'd want to pop outside in the nice weather to do some programming. You quickly find why that wasn't as glamorous as you expected. But if you had a laptop with such a screen I would expect it to work great.

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There's a lot better being done by Boox, and even with colour e-ink in terms of ghosting. I think a lot of that is software end, though.

The one unfortunate thing is that this monitor seems to have a glossy screen, not matte, but maybe that's an additional layer over a dev kit?

If this truly is 'open', then it should be trivial to write special X11/Wayland drivers for it, to handle a lot of the ghosting issues at that end. I think Boox actually refreshes portions of screens, and a double or triple video buffer in X/Wayland could do the same.

(One problem with Boox is their relentless phone-home to servers in China, which cannot be disable by normal means.)

Thanks! Yes, it does update quickly, and ghosting is still an issue, though I think there’s room for improvement on the OS/software side. I gave a talk at the Linux App Summit earlier this year where I shared some ideas for how this could work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7xTs9-2AgU

Agree, and for those who aren't aware, these grants are available to anyone, not limited to Netherlands residents: https://nlnet.nl/NGI0/

"EU financially supporting this project."

wdym about EU funding this project, I see backer list and there are bunch of US citizen

It's an interesting project, but I'm confused why they got funded with EU money. Their company is based in Boston and it looks as both of them are living in them US, which suggests neither of them is European citizen or pays taxes in the EU, which ultimately is where the money for these grants comes from. The funding requirements of NLNet state "it is a knock-out criterion for each project to have a "European dimension [...] where a significant contribution towards the vision of the Next Generation Internet initiative also qualifies".

I'm not trying to pick on this particular project, I just found out non-EU projects can apply at all. I hope the majority of NLNet money goes to projects that actually are executed in Europe and build expertise there.

Thank you for your kind words. I agree that small teams can achieve a lot.

We’re grateful to NLnet and the EU, whose support made this project possible and especially in overcoming complex challenges. We’ve made a point of attending conferences and sharing what we’ve learned. Now that the project is ready, we can focus on expanding that knowledge and collaborating with people everywhere.

It’s obviously the left one. I don’t see much glare on it.

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Their big claim, at least it seems on quick glance, is in the controller, not the display. You can use any e-ink display with it. The display with glare that you're complaining about I think is just the cheap display they're including in the dev kit.

At 0:47, both sides use the same e-ink panel, the left in outdoor conditions, and the right indoor.

Latency was one of the challenges we addressed, and our driver board supports different panels, you can use one with lower glare if preferred.

Even without the advantages of e-ink, a display which one can view _anywhere_ is a compelling thing, which opens up a lot of possibilities --- my favourite Windows device was a Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110 w/ a transflective LCD, which I used as my main computer, e-book reader, notepad (writing/drawing/annotating with a stylus), and map display when traveling.

The transflective display eliminated issues regarding reflection or the display getting washed out by even full, bright, direct sunlight (I would use it for reference material for building sand castles at the beach).

Unfortunately, transflective LCDs do _not_ showroom well (dim) and no one seemed willing to make the investment to show their capabilities (build a daylight-equivalent light booth on the store floor).

I keep eyeing a Daylight Computer, but these days, I just use a Kindle Scribe for reading and note-taking/sketching/reference, and I limit my activities when in full sun to those things which it can do well, changing location/finding shade when I need to do other things.

Can you showcase the cyberdeck? I've found a post by you on Twitter, but I don't know if you demo it elsewhere.

I use a similar setup :) Have you done a blog post or anything?

> I built a cyberdeck

Have you written about this anywhere? If not, I’d love to see a ShowHN post about your project and I bet I’m not the only one.

What’s your background? I ask because I really want something like a TRS-80 Model 100. Is interfacing a low end (power efficient) board to an LCD or eInk display something an electronics neophyte could reasonably take on?

A lot of homemade slab computers seem to rely on Raspberry Pi boards but those draw quite a lot of power and tend to run Linux. It’s not a combination that I’m going to be able to run for weeks at a time on 4 AA batteries (one of my goals).

When building your cyberdeck, were there any resources in particular that you found helpful?

Maybe if they supported touch.

That was my very first thought as well. I'm wanting to build a display that can show the status of various things - garage door, temperature, air quality, etc. Ideally it could run on battery too so I could mount it anywhere. Just need to find the time and motivation to do it, among all the other priorities & interests.

Also shout out to https://usetrmnl.com/ which is much cheaper than OP if all you need is a display that updates every 5+ minutes. The founder is a really cool guy and cares a lot about this project

I talked to my wife constantly about how badly I want an e-ink monitor, they’re just still so expensive for the specs I want haha. I’d take a solid 24”, maybe 21”, b&w 30hz at this point if the price was right (sub-$500).

Three years ago, I posted about modding a ThinkPad T480 into an e-ink laptop: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26245563

That turned into a community project and eventually into building our own FPGA-based e-ink display controller to improve refresh speed and reduce ghosting.

The result is a dev kit and monitor: open hardware, supports 6–13" monochrome and color e-ink panels over HDMI or USB-C, up to 75 Hz with sub-100 ms latency, and includes a C API.

Hardware, firmware, docs and schematics: https://github.com/Modos-Labs/Glider

The Type-C DP input appears to be using a DP to LVDS converter, so the FPGA is already accepting LVDS, it just doesn't expose a connector for it. But for interfacing with laptops, these days it's eDP that matters, not LVDS. So the issue is mostly the mismatch between an internal eDP connector vs the board's type-C connector.

We have some other videos, with more to come this week.

Generative Forest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fLYVwh4XCE

Return of the Obra Dinn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClK8lDJWJcw

Can't wait to see what you have in mind ;)