I'd really like to have a decent (let's say >13") display to hang on a wall in my room and display weather, my todo list, etc. It doesn't necessarily have to be E-ink proper, but I like the idea of having something that doesn't emit its own light. More like an electronic whiteboard.
Alternatives include something like the Vestaboard, which is not cheap, and probably fairly noisy.
Are there products I'm missing here?
This is the black/white one, they do a black/white/red one too. But beware, they take really long to refresh (the red color takes several refreshes to appear). And the one with red is on backorder till June.
It can be powered by a raspberry pi (or ESP32 or Arduino) and is (much) cheaper than the ereader options of the same size: Only about $170.
PS Beware: You can't simply start up a user interface like X-Windows on it. You have to write software to display on it. The display is addressed in 4 separate sections so it's not super easy.
Go on eBay and buy an older NOOK device (they all ran Android) for $20, tape it to your wall, and point at your web page of choice.
Dasung sells a 13.3" e-ink monitor: https://www.amazon.com/Dasung-Paperlike-13-3-E-Ink-Monitor/d...
The best I can tell is that there just hasn't been an investment in scaling up fabrication anywhere near what the likes of LG (mostly LG, actually) has done with >40" OLED panels. Presumably the demand isn't there yet, and so larger-format electrophoretics remain the product of low-volume, high-cost manufacturing processes.
The largest size currently available is 42" and it is used in outdoor and indoor scenarios. Indoor use is for education purposes as a digital whiteboard - see Quilla (https://www.engadget.com/2017-01-03-quirklogic-s-quilla-is-a...).
None of these are especially applicable for home use due to the price tag (just to be clear, the display itself is very expensive). What you could do is use Sonys larger format eInk tablet, use Remarkable EInk tablet or hack your own solution from an older Kobo reader.
We're offering solutions somewhere in the middle - traditionally we were focused on SME, where our devices are being used as universal digital signage (http://www.visionect.com) or tailored for room booking (http://getjoan.com), so a bit pricy for home use. But we just launched a 6" device called Joan Home (https://getjoan.com/shop/joan-home/) that syncs to your calendar and are looking to expand it with new functionality in the future. We're thing of integrations with home automation, pomodoro timer, IFTTT, etc...
Comments on the Joan Home are welcome - as we're actively thinking of developing this into a more feature rich product in next two months.
The only commercial product I know of that uses it is from Visionect but it's a meant for digital signage rather than as a computer display: https://www.visionect.com/product/place-and-play-32/. It's less expensive than their earlier system but still around $2500.
There are some projects dedicated to driving the screen with an ESP32, which already has WiFi built in, has good low power modes and is pretty cheap as well [1] [2].
There's also a project driving e-ink displays with an stm32 [3] and one to do it with an FPGA [4].
Beyond 13" things get really expensive and hard to find - best I can do is 12,48" for 150€ [5].
[0]: https://aliexpress.com/item/32983492389.html
[1]: https://github.com/dqydj/PaperBack_EPaper_Display
[2]: https://hackaday.io/project/168193-976-e-paper-controller-ki...
[3]: https://hackaday.io/project/11537-nekocal-an-e-ink-calendar
https://hackaday.com/2016/01/19/a-digital-canvas-thats-hard-...
It matches the LCD lighting to the ambient light, so that it doesn’t have that “glowing screen” look, but instead looks like a flat picture.
Something else irrelevant to your question, but trés cool: https://hackaday.com/2019/08/17/great-artificial-daylight-vi...
Dasung, Onyx have been market leaders in this category and they are expensive. There are E-ink tablets from several other manufacturers as mentioned in other comments, but they rarely are external displays.
Then there are reliability issues with cheap DIY E-Ink displays, they don't last long and especially when displaying low refresh rate data like Weather, todo list; there will be ghosting issues quite soon.
I'm not exactly sure on whether manufacturing large E-ink external displays is just an unit-economics problem which will get resolved with improvement in technology or there is some underlying Intellectual Property issues from the likes of Amazon,Dasung,Onyx etc.
[1]https://needgap.com/problems/43-affordable-e-ink-large-exter...
I imagine in 5-10 years or so, we'll see what you're imagining.
The most interesting problem to tackle was “the blue glowing screen problem”.
One of the many ways that screens give themselves away as screens is by emitting light that is “out of character” with the surrounding environment. They can be too bright or too dark relative to the things around them, and indoors, displays often seem too blue.
I solved these problems with what I call “luminance matching”. The basic idea is to sample the light falling on the frame several times a second, and then adjust the display and image parameters so that what’s displayed is “correct” given the surrounding environment.
Unfortunately it looks to be quite expensive, but the technology is there.
As others have already pointed out, the newly released Remarkable 2 sounds exactly like what you’re looking for. https://remarkable.com/
https://shopkits.eink.com/product/13-3%cb%9d-epaper-display-...
31.2˝ monochrome ePaper Display:
https://shopkits.eink.com/product/31-2%CB%9D-monochrome-epap...
And here is 42˝ monochrome ePaper Display:
https://shopkits.eink.com/product/42%cb%9d-monochrome-epaper...
Pricey, unfortunately. But does the work.
Sad that Amazon makes Kindle very closed to modification in terms of software. Therefore I am a huge fan of ReMarkable because an underdog may allow us to finally build e-ink apps: https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable
Such as an older LCD panel without a backlight? It doesn't sound like you're looking for anything special here.
One that I know is Kingjim Pomera line. They have a few reflexive LCD models based on some rare Toshiba uC, an E Ink model that runs on good old ARM926EJ-S, IIRC, and a color backlit LCD model that just runs Android Linux stripped bare(no Android GUI at all). Some people are running X on the last one.
Those are only available in Japan with JP106 keyboard(think of ANSI with ISO return, ISO symbols and two extra keys next to spacebar) and I can’t assure hackability, but as an input...
http://www.artecdesign.ee/products/e-paper-digital-signage-p...
Foe just an electronic whiteboard there are Boogieboards.
I would suspect they have smaller ones too.
http://einkcn.com/post/216.html
https://www.sohu.com/a/330365162_100238338
I think it's a waste of tax-payers money. Besides why it's not been stolen yet?
For consumer electronics I found modern e-ink tablets have very good refresh rate. Watching video is pretty smooth.