From Hacking a T480 to the Fastest Open-Hardware 75 Hz E-Ink Display
Three years ago, I posted here about hacking together a fast e-ink laptop from a T480 because I was tired of spending all day on LCDs. I liked e-ink’s comfort, but it was too slow for day-to-day use. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26245563 That post drew in people, which grew into a community experimenting with ways to make e-ink usable for everyday computing. That project later turned into a company and a multi-year project to make e-ink fast and open. We built our own FPGA-based controller, Caster, and went through multiple iterations to push past e-ink’s usual limits,…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
Three years ago, I posted here about hacking together a fast e-ink laptop from a T480 because I was tired of spending all day on LCDs. I liked e-ink’s comfort, but it was too slow for day-to-day use. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26245563 That post drew in people, which grew into a community experimenting with ways to make e-ink usable for everyday computing. That project later turned into a company and a multi-year project to make e-ink fast and open. We built our own FPGA-based controller, Caster, and went through multiple iterations to push past e-ink’s usual limits, slow refresh, ghosting, and proprietary controllers. Now, after three years, we’ve launched the Modos Paper Developer Kit and Monitor: the fastest open-hardware e-ink display, with 75 Hz refresh and sub-100 ms latency. It works with 6" to 13.3" mono or color panels over HDMI or USB-C, supports multiple grayscale modes, and has a C API for low-level control. The hardware, firmware, and schematics are on our GitHub. https://github.com/Modos-Labs/Glider Our goal is to make e-ink fast and open enough that anyone can build on it, for hacking, research, or daily use. Thanks, HN, for being part of the journey.
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