Comment by varun_ch
1 day ago
There is an awesome YouTube video about this from the person who made it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nHbA2-_qzH4
1 day ago
There is an awesome YouTube video about this from the person who made it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nHbA2-_qzH4
This link is way more interesting than the original ieee.
It was submitted to HN 2 times already but unfortunately it flew under the radar: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwa...
Upvoted them both. I’m an ECE prof, and the video summed up why working with students is so rewarding.
Okay, that video is great.
Product questions that I couldn't find an answer to. From https://www.crowdsupply.com/modos-tech/modos-flow, I see "On the go, you can power Flow at up to 40 Hz with a single USB Type-C cable. At a desk, you can connect additional power and take advantage of its full 60 Hz refresh rate."
1) This surprises me a bit... is USB-PD incompatible with DisplayPort alt mode, or is this just based on an observation that display port devices tend to give limited power output?
2) Is every DisplayPort alt mode host able to give enough power to run at 40 Hz? In particular, can this be driven on the go directly from an iPhone?
3) Is that second USB port usable as a data port hubbed to the device when powering over the DisplayPort port?
4) I know it's possible to provide power from the display back to the host device when using DisplayPort alt mode -- when powering the display from the second USB-C port, is the connected device also powered?
The two use cases that would be super interesting to me is plugging this in to my iPhone or similar on-the-go, and plugging a USB-C keyboard into the second port on it for quick e-mails at the coffee shop and similar; and plugging this in to an iPhone, plugging my power bank into the monitor and keeping the monitor in high-power mode and the iPhone charging while working with a Bluetooth keyboard.
Obviously I don't expect it to handle these use cases out of the box, but... open source! This is really a question about what the hardware design is capable of, not the current software/firmware/FPGA capabilities.
I really want to buy it so I searched for the same questions bit in the end I just decided to go for it
I was watching the video the other day, and my jaw dropped. Wenting is a display-technology beast. Watch his other videos too; he seems to be able to squeeze every last bit of possible performance out of every kind of display, and then some.
Wow, I'm glad to see that person is getting some more recognition for this work.
A claim in the video that I can't verify but makes economic/logistic sense is that the speed problem isn't the panels but the controllers. The current crop of controllers are optimized for low power, which fits the e-reader use case but that is not optimal for the interactive use case.
> A claim in the video that I can't verify but makes economic/logistic sense is that the speed problem isn't the panels but the controllers.
I don't understand the claim. It is lacking in specifics. Are they claiming that electrophoretic materials (meaning the panels) can actually switch (meaning move pigments) faster than say x.y micrometers per second? I don't think that is true. The article shows that what Wenting did ("binary transition") is pretty much the same as what companies like Dasung did. Instead of trying to have grayscale, it is faster to hit somewhat-black and somewhat-white and give the illusion of fast movement than actual fast movement.
> Are they claiming that electrophoretic materials (meaning the panels) can actually switch (meaning move pigments) faster than say x.y micrometers per second?
No, I think the claim is that the controllers are slower that what the panels can theoretically support.
> The current crop of controllers are optimized for low power, which fits the e-reader use case but that is not optimal for the interactive use case.
Why try to contort the technology for something it's not good at, instead of using a more appropriate technology like transflective LCDs? Eink isn't the only option for reflective displays. If you increase the power use of eink to get better refresh rates, I imagine you'd end up using more power than (and still end up with lower refresh rates than) an MIP display.
I don't understand the growth of the market as a whole for eink monitors, when tLCDs exist and are disappearing from the market.
I'm pretty sure e-ink has a much higher ceiling for reflectance than TLCDs/RLCDs, so you'll be able to use it comfortably without a frontlight in a lot more situations which could more than make up for increased power usage. I think they are also naturally better in terms of glare compared to any type of LCD.
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I think the coolest display tech was Mirasol.
Uses flipping wave interference for color. So cool. How do you make black? Easy! Humans can't see UV! :D
[1] https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/the-rise-and...
I'm currently reading your post on a transflective LCD monitor. The problem with them is the very low contrast ratio which requires very high ambient illumination to make them readable or other workarounds like what they did for the Daylight DC-1.
It isn't clear to me that eink's underlying display technology isn't good at the interactive computing use case so much as the implementations aren't optimized for it. There could be a position where more power than an eink reader is used but still far less than traditional active displays since unchanged pixels aren't driven.
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I found the video on YouTube before the IEEE article. It's a fascinating story.