[HN Gopher] Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generati...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art
Author : ea016
Score : 209 points
Date : 2023-10-10 18:56 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (eliot.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (eliot.blog)
| landgenoot wrote:
| Love it. But way too expensive, especially because we don't know
| what the quality / price will do in the future when the patents
| expire.
|
| For that price, you can buy a 42" color printer.
| tonoto wrote:
| Fantastic project, thanks for sharing! Prohibitive pricing for
| home use, but I would really love to have that as a picture frame
| on the wall. One can dream for the future..
| xnx wrote:
| I thought I'd heard of all the dithering options from
| https://tannerhelland.com/2012/12/28/dithering-eleven-algori...,
| but surprised to read there's another one
| (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/3288) that was used in this
| project.
| cubefox wrote:
| Blue noise dithering seems to be a form of ordered dithering
| which is better than other forms of ordered dithering, but in
| terms of quality it is not as good as error diffusion dithering
| (look up the Wikipedia comparison on the statue of David). But
| blue noise dithering has the advantage that it can be
| implemented as a pixel shader, unlike error diffusion. So it
| can e.g. be used for video games. So I think for the picture
| frame error diffusion would have been a bit better.
| lionkor wrote:
| That's a very neat project. The only issue I have with it is that
| it's basically a passive energy waster. It produces images by
| burning GPU power, when it could instead curate art from an
| existing amount of art (of which there is more to ever go
| through, almost in any category). Some projects that use AI could
| be replaced with other tech and be much more efficient.
| bee_rider wrote:
| They should render these images when there's excess renewable
| energy, then store them for later.
| lawlessone wrote:
| This is just a little too close to NFT art for me lol.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| My home computer batch processing prompts thru Stable Diffusion
| can generate and then nicely upscale images at at rate of about
| 1 every 5 seconds. Or 360 per half-hour. Which means a newly
| image on the display every day to look at for a year in just an
| half hour of computation.
|
| At about 300W of GPU + 120W of PC, that is 420W * 0.5hrs =
| 0.210kWhr. This is a rounding error on my monthly electric
| bill. About six cents.
|
| I've spent more energy than that likely just sitting and
| reading HackerNews this week.
| GaggiX wrote:
| I think it simply uses some API to generate the images.
| evrimoztamur wrote:
| How does the API generate the images then?
| GaggiX wrote:
| It doesn't really matter if it's really cheap.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Magic?
| dheera wrote:
| It doesn't take a lot of GPU to produce one image, and you
| could always just keep a single image on the wall for a longer
| time if you want to reduce that impact.
|
| You can also have it not produce images at night or when you
| are not around the house.
|
| Lots of ways to save energy. The impact of an image every few
| hours or whatever is nanoscule compared to your transportation
| and heating needs.
|
| (Also if your apartment uses electric resistive heating, fire
| away with your GPU, you're just producing images in the process
| of producing heat instead of passing it through a resistor.
| It's no less efficient.)
| xnx wrote:
| The cost (and environmental impact) of generated images is a
| rounding error compared to the $7,500+ project cost. As an
| aside, I wonder how much smaller and faster a diffusion model
| could be if trained (quantized?) to 4-bit grayscale images.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Tablet manufacturers would do well to consider that the picture
| frame is the desirable form factor for E-ink tablets, perhaps
| more so than the iPad style hand held tablet.
|
| Look to what hobbyists are hacking to find commercial
| opportunity.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Posh frames e-ink friends! Here's my generative newspaper:
| https://i.imgur.com/tD1t9u3.jpeg
|
| My wallet stopped at 13.3" though :)
|
| Update for those who saw me post it before: I recently charged
| the battery for the first time since hanging it in March, which
| met my expectations.
|
| Shout-out also to the people at Halbe Rahmen, the best picture
| frames in the world.
| dheera wrote:
| Wondering if you have by any chance shared code and plans for
| the long battery life setup?
|
| Mine is still wired but I'm thinking of using ESP32 + deep
| sleep.
| sho_hn wrote:
| I _still_ haven't set the GitHub repo to public :( Real-life
| intruded in a major way (first baby).
|
| esp32 + deep sleep + external RTC is what this is using. I
| posted some of my experiences with getting it as low as I
| could here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37663913
|
| Here's a few more pics: https://imgur.com/a/NoTr8XX
|
| I found the mention of Blue Noise Dithering in this project
| quite interesting! I've not put a lot of effort into picking
| the nicest possible dithering method (just a basic Floyd-
| Steinberg) for the embedded article photos, partly because
| the whole newspaper look didn't seem to warrant it, but it
| might be worth taking stock of what the latest on dithering
| is.
| yohannparis wrote:
| Where is the information on how you built it?
| sho_hn wrote:
| There's some info on my Hackaday project listing:
| https://hackaday.io/project/190478-hyepaper
|
| Also the album link in the other comment.
| lawlessone wrote:
| You could really gaslight house guests with this. Just deny
| it's changed.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Do you think people are fooled by any tech these days?
|
| I suspect people expect everything to be magic now.
| sho_hn wrote:
| So far my guests are mostly puzzled by "Why'd you frame
| that?" until I tell them it will in fact change and isn't
| my most prized selection of news articles :-)
| jnjnnksjnxjjsj wrote:
| [flagged]
| bazeblackwood wrote:
| Got excited, but then you qualified it was AI.
|
| AI art is not generative art, it is reductive "art". It requires
| samples of the art style you wish to cop, and it always produces
| something artificial and less than the sum of its parts.
|
| On the other hand, generative art is procedural, and represents
| the thought process of a human being.
|
| Better luck making meaning.
| lawlessone wrote:
| I despise how some companies opted to scrape artists works
| without their permission.
|
| But aren't the prompts used also representative of a thought
| process? The chosen network architecture and the choices of
| images used to train also represent thought.
| nealeratzlaff wrote:
| This is really cool! I've wanted to buy something similar for a
| long time, but in RGB. I know Samsung makes the Frame, but its
| not hackable, and its a waste of power. I don't ever want the
| thing to function as a TV, just a way to display generative art.
|
| At one time there apparently was this:
| https://mono.frm.fm/en/shop/ But the price was crazy. There's not
| much out there in terms of appropriately priced digital picture
| frames.
| chromakode wrote:
| Awesome project! I'd strongly recommend swapping in some
| antireflective glass. There's a couple affordable options with
| less than 1% reflection [1][2]. Made a huge difference vs. stock
| acrylic on my frames that get lots of environmental light.
|
| [1] https://www.groglass.com/product/artglass-ar-70/
|
| [2] https://www.framedestination.com/prod/sh/ultravue-
| uv70-pictu...
| sho_hn wrote:
| I second this recommendation! Frame manufacturers sometimes
| call these products "museum glass", which combines anti-
| reflective properties with UV filters, usually with price
| points at 70% and 92% filters.
|
| Some E-ink panels can be somewhat susceptible to UV light and
| perform better under a filter. You will sometimes find warnings
| in data sheets about refresh performance in direct sunlight,
| and danger of long-term permanent damage. Some of E-ink's
| signage products have, I think, filter layers built-in.
|
| But also if you're using a passepartout like in this project,
| and the frame will hang in sunlight and you're not sure how the
| paper will perform, it's worth springing for the UV protection
| to avoid yellowing over time.
| imnotdang wrote:
| [flagged]
| robszumski wrote:
| This is great! I would love to see a sample of the color input
| images and the resulting image on the display.
| itishappy wrote:
| It's monochrome.
| robszumski wrote:
| The video has a lot of glare and the dithering seems like an
| important part. I wanted to contrast that process with the
| original.
| ea016 wrote:
| OP here. Here's a comparison with an input image vs gray
| levels vs dithered: https://imgur.com/a/osE57eh
|
| When displayed on the frame you can barely see the
| dithering. Interestingly you see the jpeg compression
| artifacts a lot more
| adolph wrote:
| In terms of battery powering it, I wonder how many amps it takes
| to power a refresh. The Salt driver is 12v, which I guess can be
| shut down between refreshes.
| sho_hn wrote:
| In my e-ink newspaper, I have the driver board behind a relay
| (because it had an annoying idle current draw even when you
| tell the driver chip to go to standby, and they even added an
| annoying power LED ...) and do just fully shut it off between
| refreshes.
|
| There's some projects that forego a driver ASIC entirely and
| drive the waveforms directly from a MCU, although I guess this
| large panel has a different voltage domain.
| xnx wrote:
| Well done. There would be so many more cool applications of e-ink
| if it wasn't $2,500 for a 42" display:
| https://shopkits.eink.com/en/product/detail/42''MonochromeeP...
| (minimum order 3)
|
| For comparison a 42" full-color 60fps TV with remote, speakers,
| wifi, etc. etc. is $140.
|
| It seems like the patent holder could be making a lot more money
| if they dropped the price.
| graypegg wrote:
| Hmm. I wonder what the whole-sale price is? A TV with wifi is
| partly subsidized by the ads you see when you turn it on. This
| 2500$ display seems like it's for small run signage, so they
| know it's being sold for government/business use. Probably a
| bit inflated.
|
| Does Rakutan/Amazon/Pocketbook really pay a similar cost/size
| ratio for the panels on their ereaders? I hope not!
| lawlessone wrote:
| >so they know it's being sold for government/business use.
| Probably a bit inflated.
|
| You just reminded me, a few years ago i wanted to buy a
| transparent screen for a DIY project. The company said they
| couldn't sell it to me because they're b2b.
|
| I think it was both a volume thing and a tax thing.. and
| possibly a liability thing.
| tomcam wrote:
| Or they may have no procedure for selling one-offs to end
| users. It's not uncommon.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> For comparison a 42" full-color 60fps TV with remote,
| speakers, wifi, etc. etc. is $140._
|
| Because it's a lot easier and cheaper to manufacture large LCD
| panels at scale than E-ink film.
|
| _> It seems like the patent holder could be making a lot more
| money if they dropped the price._
|
| I don't know any company or shareholders that would say no to
| making more money so if this would actually be true then it
| would, but that's not the reality.
|
| The FUD that large e-ink displays are expensive because of some
| patent conspiracy needs to stop.
|
| Large e-ink screens are expensive because manufacturing yields
| are very low and so are sales volumes.
|
| Source: worked with e-ink on products with big and small
| displays
|
| Edit: So I'm saying the truth and getting down voted for it?
| Fine, then feel free to keep believing whatever you think is
| the truth. No point in discussing it further.
| xnx wrote:
| I didn't realize e-ink manufacturing was such a tricky
| process. I would think there would be a lot of applications
| for larger e-ink panels even if they had a number of stuck
| pixels.
| bigfudge wrote:
| I think it would be interesting to hear from an insider (with
| examples/evidence etc) what the mechanism is for eink to be
| more expensive. I/e/ the fundamentals for why this is the
| case beyond economies of scale. Given this history of the
| patent it looks to the outsider like this probably isn't the
| case and short sighted rent seeking is the problem. Would
| love to be wrong though, so if you do have a good explanation
| then here would be a great place to air it. I've not seen
| anything elsewhere...
| LapsangGuzzler wrote:
| I'm sure the ad-driven subsidy on TVs plays a huge part. TV
| prices have declined as "dumb" TVs have been phased out of
| the market. A more niche tool like a large e-ink display
| might not make as much sense from to price this way since
| ad systems need large networks of users to be relevant.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| people underestimate how long e-ink stagnated: it seems
| hard to imagine an alternate timeline where e-ink had
| taken the place of current LED outdoor billboards for
| example... until you realize we were decades away from
| LEDs being cheap and robust enough for outdoor signage
| when eInk was already fundamentally similar enough the
| tech we have now
|
| The company that owned the e-ink patents couldn't scale
| properly until they were acquired around 2010: in an
| alternate timeline where development open enough in the
| early 2000s, we might have ended up with eInk display
| modules large enough to be assembled into incrementally
| larger and more profit driving devices
|
| Even now you see that with eInk store tags for example:
| imagine if the profit they're driving now had arrived 20
| years ago and gotten re-invested
| BoorishBears wrote:
| I didn't downvote... but if you're being downvoted it's
| probably for ignoring the flywheel effect needed to scale
| novel tech in the market.
|
| Yes e-ink has high wastage, and yes demand is low, but having
| had a strong arming expensive patent holder didn't help the
| situation. The patents are actually expiring/expired but at
| some point the damage is already done.
|
| A great corollarly to e-ink is 3d printers: they were very
| expensive, very low volume products that needed to recoup
| expensive development costs... but when the 200 lbs gorilla
| sitting on the market in the form of patents started to die
| down, a lot more players start to iterate, which unlocked
| advancements, which made things cheaper and more accessible,
| which improved demand, which then incentivized more
| advancements... and now we have $400 printers that outperform
| $10,000 printers from not that long ago.
|
| Most display tech starts high wastage, low demand. Patents
| aren't a guaranteed death, but e-ink was just a bit too far
| off the path for absolutely required innovations to overcome
| the added resistance. In the mean time other technologies got
| better: sunlight performance of non-eink displays has
| improved dramatically for example.
|
| Now the moment has probably passed and e-ink is doomed to
| stay a niche sideline product as a result.
| [deleted]
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I've read (probably on prior HN discussions about this?) that
| the manufacturing process still has major yield issues-- when
| you're making small displays, you can slice around the bad
| pixels and not have to waste as much, but making a large
| display requires a huge sheet to all be perfect.
|
| Then again, if that was really it, surely there'd be a market
| for people who want a 42" e-ink display and are willing to
| accept some proportion of bad pixels in exchange for a deep
| discount. Which really shouldn't matter much, particularly for
| applications where distance-viewing is the expectation.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| The first flat panel tvs started in the $x000 price range. I'm
| amazed an eink display this big is actually affordable (minimum
| quantities aside).
| qingcharles wrote:
| My first 40" flat panel TV ran something around $6000 IIRC.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| E-ink has been around for a long time. It's not one of the
| first panels.
| diggan wrote:
| > if it wasn't $2,500 for a 42" display
|
| Try $3000 :)
|
| > Driving boards are not included in the display module
| package. E Ink Salt kit is designed to support this module
|
| > Salt Driving Board - $500.00 -
| https://shopkits.eink.com/en/product/detail/SaltDrivingBoard
| red_hare wrote:
| My dream is, when these finally come down in price, to build a
| dynamic DnD map.
| spullara wrote:
| Why not just put any other kind of display flat and put glass
| over it to protect it?
|
| Edit: Someone has your dream display already :)
| https://www.etsy.com/listing/1463146123/43-4k-dnd-tv-table
| layer8 wrote:
| Well, Apple's 32" Pro Display XDR is $5000, there's always
| something.
| prewett wrote:
| If it's a 4k TV it also has more pixels and better refresh
| rate. And color. But for that extra $2360 you get the feature
| that your image is still there when the power is off. I expect
| that feature would be substantially more costly regardless of
| the patent holder's extra.
| nomel wrote:
| > you get the feature that your image is still there when the
| power is off
|
| How is that a realistic feature? Who is losing power and
| being happy that they spent a few thousand more, nearly 40x,
| than a 36" photo quality print, just so the image can remain
| while their lights are off?
| k1t wrote:
| The point is that it only uses power when changing the
| image, so a small battery can run it for a long time - not
| that it works during a power outage.
|
| (and of course it is a lot easier to change than a printed
| photo)
| numpad0 wrote:
| Is the control board actually wrong, or is the cable supposed to
| be origami folded for adjustment? A control board that works
| should be really close to the right one if it weren't.
| supportengineer wrote:
| >> instantly nerd-snipped
|
| er, what?
| mcphage wrote:
| It's a term from an old XKCD: https://xkcd.com/356/
| supportengineer wrote:
| Oh, snipe not snip.
| ea016 wrote:
| Thanks, fixing the typo :)
| Aspos wrote:
| You have plenty of space behind the screen. Wondering if you
| could harness wifi signal to generate power. Given days between
| changes, perhaps you could harvest enough amperage to make a
| change.
|
| Or maybe you could hide a Qi charger into the wall?
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23181-1
| esafak wrote:
| Samsung sells an LED TV specifically for this use case. Currently
| only at 4K.
|
| https://www.samsung.com/us/tvs/the-frame/highlights/
| renewiltord wrote:
| A friend has the Samsung Frame and I think you can only
| interface with it via the Samsung SmartThings app. It's quite
| closed. So you need an online thing for the TV and then you
| upload it into their app.
| mholm wrote:
| Yep, it's very locked down, and Art Mode behavior is often
| anti-user to promote their $10/month Art Store subscription.
| There are limited matting options and I believe it
| intentionally crops photos incorrectly, even if you upload in
| the correct aspect ratio. It also takes about a minute to
| scroll down to 'User Art' sections with how slow their UI is.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| I'm browsing this link for a good 5min. Looks interesting. I
| get that it tries to simulate paper, but I have no idea how.
|
| Even the "explore technology" link has little extra detail. I
| don't even know if it's backlit.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| It's just a tv with a picture frame and some additional
| software/wallpapers
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| It's just a TV with a matte screen and a way for Samsung to
| sell you public domain art.
| huehehue wrote:
| I have one of these, and only in a very specific environment is
| it convincing as not-a-TV (aside from the concerns of privacy
| and their proprietary app).
|
| Especially at night, I find the backlight makes it painfully
| obvious that it's just a TV and I'd much rather have something
| like e-ink which blends into the surroundings.
| bigfudge wrote:
| They look cool. Would be great to have an oled version
| without a backlight.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I would love two wall mounted e-ink displays showing chess boards
| so my 14 year old son could play chess with his grandfather.
|
| I imagine the game keeping track of whose turn it is and being
| able to give voice commands to make moves.
|
| Then they could play games over a longer period of time, maybe
| make one move per day.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| what's your budget :)
|
| the Lilygo T5 with Touch screen + a lipo battery would have all
| the hardware you need
|
| just need to port chess to the platform after that
| https://www.hackster.io/Sergey_Urusov/arduino-mega-chess-d54...
|
| figuring out NAT traversal to get them talking to each other
| from each other's homes might be tricky/fun, but there may be
| ways around that...
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Pretty cool at $36.36 USD
|
| https://www.lilygo.cc/products/t5-4-7-inch-e-paper-v2-3
|
| It would be great to be able to buy this in a size that would
| mount easily into common photo frame formats.
|
| Ideally with a battery that could last months and optional
| power.
|
| If I was retired it's the sort of project I'd happily waste
| time on.
| konschubert wrote:
| I am making these displays that come in a wooden frame:
|
| https://shop.invisible-computers.com/products/invisible-
| cale...
|
| You could render the current state of the chess game to an
| image and serve that image on a URL on the internet. Then
| you can connect the display to that image:
|
| https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-
| calendar/image...
|
| Admittedly that's still a lot of work from your side, and a
| little applet to keep running...
| schlarpc wrote:
| I have a similar display, and also use blue noise dithering. Mine
| is driven in the backend by a web browser, which means I was able
| to abuse CSS and mix-blend-mode to do the dithering for me:
| ha-card::after { content: ""; background-image:
| url(/local/visionect-dither.png); background-repeat:
| repeat; position: absolute; height: 100%;
| width: 100%; display: block; mix-blend-mode:
| multiply; }
|
| The dithering texture used is 128_128/LDR_LLL1_10.png from
| https://github.com/Calinou/free-blue-noise-textures
| lawlessone wrote:
| what are the 3d and 4d textures?
| webkike wrote:
| (I could be wrong, but here's what I'm guessing) 3D refers to
| RGB, and 4D refers to RGB plus Alpha
| freedomben wrote:
| When are we going to have cheaper e-ink screens available? Anyone
| know if the situation has changed in the last couple of years?
| See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143779
| grawlinson wrote:
| Realistically, it'll be when the patents expire.
| eli wrote:
| My understanding is it's much more about demand than patents.
|
| LED panels got cheap because we built factories that pump out
| a _lot_ of them.
| lrem wrote:
| I just glanced, they still want about 500 bucks for the 13"
| screen and half of that for the board to drive it. While I
| have no clue what making the screen at a low scale might
| cost, the board cannot possibly be five times more
| expensive than a Raspberry Pi, can it?
| avianlyric wrote:
| Realistically you're not paying for the hardware when you
| buy the driver board, but rather the software baked into
| those boards.
|
| The waveforms, and the algorithms that create waveforms,
| used to drive eInk displays at reasonable speeds and
| produce high quality images are highly proprietary and
| very difficult to develop. In theory it's easy to make an
| eInk display an image, but doing that in a reasonable
| period of time, when transitioning from potentially any
| starting state, and handling the crosstalk between
| pixels, makes creating good images on an eInk display
| pretty hard to get right.
| sho_hn wrote:
| No, simple driver boards aren't super complicated. Nor
| are the chips on them manufactured on the fanciest nodes.
| They're not super-high-volume either though and as a
| result somewhat expensive on a BoM.
|
| Here's the data sheet for the ITE IT8951, a frequently-
| used ASIC for this purpose that supports basic partial
| updates as well: https://www.waveshare.net/w/upload/1/18/
| IT8951_D_V0.2.4.3_20...
|
| Here's a sourcing price: https://www.win-
| source.net/products/detail/ite/it8951e-64-dx...
|
| It's basically a fairly simple SPI interface (or here a
| SPI wrapper around an internal Z80 protocol). The rest of
| the board is power supply handling and a DRAM framebuffer
| chip, external to the driver ASIC on SPI as well. I wrote
| a custom driver for this in Rust for my project, and it
| only took about a day despite a few leaky-abstractions
| oddities in how it communicates over SPI.
|
| The chip itself is basically buffer handling, image
| processing (features like JPEG decode, resampling and
| some LUT mechanisms) and a waveform generator. Others
| will have some IP blocks for, say, a HDMI frontend. Any
| decent chip company can crank this out pretty quick.
| There's easily 10+ product lines on the market.
|
| For simple things you may not even need one and can drive
| the panel from an MCU directly.
|
| There are more expensive, more advanced drivers that
| implement more complicated and higher-performance (say,
| refresh rate) update schemes or I/O though.
| GaggiX wrote:
| Which patents need to expire to have cheaper e-ink displays?
| fortran77 wrote:
| They'll just keep repeating thus trope whenever an e-ink
| project comes up. (They don't think that LCD screens have
| patents too?)
| bigfudge wrote:
| Surely most LCD patents have expired by now?
| fortran77 wrote:
| 'And there are new ones as tech improves
| dheera wrote:
| Yeah I built one with 10" screens
|
| https://dheera.net/projects/einkframe/
|
| I really want to upgrade to at least 31" but it's rather
| expensive.
|
| Separately in the next irritation of this project I'm hoping to
| use an ESP32 instead of an RPi Zero to power it, and use the
| deep sleep mode so it can periodically update but sleep through
| the rest of the time, allowing a few months of battery life
| with no wire sticking out.
|
| Even more ideal would be putting a thin strip of solar panel on
| the top edge of the frame to keep it charged, and use some kind
| of supercapacitor to power the ESP32, though I don't know if
| the parts for that exist, especially solar panel that is 1cm
| wide.
| ea016 wrote:
| OP here. Your project is really cool, thanks for sharing. I
| was considering the same idea, but it means updating the
| drivers to work on an ESP32
|
| The best option I found so far is a timer shield that can
| wake up the Raspberry periodically:
| https://www.pishop.us/product/sleepy-pi-2-power-
| management-s...
| KomoD wrote:
| What makes E-Ink so damn expensive?
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Don't get me wrong, I like this project and the write up, but it
| seems a little bit overkill. These e-ink displays are 3 thousand
| each and this guy is the CTO of PhotoRoom. Hey it's not coming
| out of my pocket and I don't know if it's company or personal
| money, but it seems a little bit off.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Really cool project!
|
| If you're into looking at different dithering techniques, there
| are a few interesting ones compared in this old CodeGolf question
| (disclaimer: I'm the one with the Fortran answer)
|
| https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/26554/dither-a-...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-10-10 23:00 UTC)