Comment by mtlynch
2 days ago
The Waveshare e-ink display he's using is $172.99.[0] The one that jgrahamc used in a sibling comment is about $200.[1]
It's a shame that it's not easier to pull the e-ink displays out of used e-readers because you can buy old Kindles on eBay for about $20-40. I know you can jailbreak them and achieve something similar to OP, but it'd be neat if you could just drop the vendor's e-reader firmware entirely and run your own software.
[0] https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/9.7inch-e...
[1] https://soldered.com/product/inkplate-10-9-7-e-paper-board-c...
I recently saw that my local supermarket had replaced most of the paper price tags with eink displays. I guess they can be updated dynamically from head office. Seems like you can buy them now on ebay for not much per unit.
https://tinyurl.com/28v4f583
I wonder what their battery life is, and which wireless protocol they use.
3-5 years typical, when I was looking at the newer ones at an auction site to play with most were IR with some bluetooth etc..
The link you provided appear to probably be IR based, but it was one of the brands that was a dead end for official docs when I was looking at them.
The newest ones seem to be using Periodic Advertising with Responses (PAwR) that was introduced in Bluetooth 5.4, but I couldn't find those type for a price I was willing to pay.
Nordic Semiconductors has an Apache licensed SDK and RToS, I didn't find the device and time to play with it but bookmarked it.
https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Development-software/nRF...
TRMNL https://usetrmnl.com/ is an e-ink display that offers many plugins, called ‘recipes’ — and you can build your own. price is ~ $150 and you can opt-in for a ‘jailbreak’ version, too. all open-source.
I don't trust the founder, and I don't want to do business with him.
His previous company was called fomo, which added popups to ecommerce stores to manipulate users into buying by claiming that others had recently bought the same product. I haven't dug into it to prove that the data was fake, but it's highly likely it's fake.
He sells marketing courses where he boasts about techniques like exploiting a website vulnerability to spam 20k people who never engaged with him at all.[0] He also proudly shares how he lied to 78k inactive users to trick them into responding to an email.[1]
[0] https://www.ryanckulp.com/targeted-outreach-email-with-20-li...
[1] https://www.ryanckulp.com/birthday-reactivation-hack/
jumping in to defend myself (thanks f5bot). you are not a serious person.
1. i'm very proud of Fomo. for 6 years we fought against fake data. i said "no" to many lucrative opportunities that were not ethical. our vision was "to given entrepreneurs the credit they deserve," and our mission was "to help consumers make better buying decisions online." your comment is libelous. [1, 2]
2. as of yesterday, all 11 of my courses are free. i've helped over 10,000 people learn to code and learn to sell. [3]
3. on the side i do a bit of pen-testing. i help stop* scammers, and i help non technical folks protect their brand. that's why Bubble added me to their home pages and dozens of cash bounties have been sent my way. [4, 5, 6]
[1] https://blog.fomo.com/having-a-vision-works/ [2] https://blog.fomo.com/introducing-honest-marketer/ [3] https://x.com/ryanckulp/status/1907099032616378815 [4] https://www.ryanckulp.com/hustlewing-is-a-scam-so-i-hacked-i... [5] https://bubble.io/security_acknowledgements [6] https://bubblesecurity.gumroad.com/l/unhackable-101
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That particular display that they use is around $40, and then there's a $3 ESP32.
I bought one because I think the software and the ecosystem is worth the price, but it's not terribly hard to make one of these for much less than $150.
thanks for the support! re DIY, we encourage this: https://docs.usetrmnl.com/go/diy/byod
I have an old kindle I was keeping in a draw as I planned to do something similar as the OP when I had time.
I've done no research yet though, what's the problem of reusing a kindle screen? It's not like old displays where you can plug a ribbon into something else?
Maybe you can, but I haven't seen anyone do that. It is tricky because the cases are apparently glued shut, so you need to do some delicate surgery to access the screen without breaking the device.[0, 1]
[0] https://blog.lidskialf.net/2021/02/08/turning-an-old-kindle-...
[1] https://www.instructables.com/Amazon-Kindle-e-ink-Screen-Tra...
No connection to this project, but I also have a couple sitting around for "some day" The biggest issue is that most of the adapter boards that are often available are not that great, so having a board built from EDPiy is an option.
https://github.com/vroland/epdiy
For the kindles that have wifi, custom firmware is probably easier?