[HN Gopher] Glider - open-source eInk monitor with an emphasis o...
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Glider - open-source eInk monitor with an emphasis on low latency
Author : mistercheph
Score : 320 points
Date : 2024-05-14 18:19 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| Max-q wrote:
| This is an amazing piece of work and the documentation is a great
| introduction to EPD.
| carterschonwald wrote:
| This is great!
| localfirst wrote:
| im not familiar with this industry but
|
| how far are we from magazine quality look and feel using eInk?
|
| like there is a scene from an old 80s sci-fi movie dude whips out
| a game magazine and the screenshot of games are fully animated
| videos...
|
| ive been waiting 30 years now for this tech
| sedatk wrote:
| I believe we need to wait for e-ink patents to expire.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I'm surprised the eink patent holders are seemingly content
| to lose their patent in time instead of licensing it and
| making real money
| PaulStatezny wrote:
| Given the couple years I spent using a Dasung Paperlike e-ink
| monitor, I think we're pretty far off from that.
|
| There seems to be a direct tradeoff between contrast/image-
| brilliance and latency/frames-per-second. Many monitors can be
| switched along that spectrum, but the current tech doesn't seem
| to be able to deliver both simultaneously at a reasonable
| price.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| A lot of the components you'd need for that sorta kinda exist:
|
| Flexible e-ink displays
|
| Color eink displays
|
| High-ish refresh rate eink displays
|
| The problem is AFAICT there's no device that covers all 3.
| Color displays have pretty big tradeoffs in terms of
| resolution/contrast/latency. However they're still way ahead of
| where they were 5-10 years ago.
| exceptione wrote:
| Impressive breadth and depth of information in just the README
| alone.
|
| When this kind of stuff gets in the open like it does here, I
| expect rapid innovation and disruption from the crowd.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| I would hope that the Pine Note people look at it. Progress for
| them has been quite slow (I follow the discord), and they are
| struggling with a lot of basic stuff.
| tonymet wrote:
| I've been using a Kindle for 10+ years now , but the poor
| responsiveness has always irked me. I can't tell if it's a
| hardware or software issue. I'm glad to see this project is
| focused on reducing latency on the hardware side.
|
| Does anyone know why the Kindle is such a bad product? I use it
| because I like e-ink and the e-book market is comprehensive, but
| I don't think it's actually a good device.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| It's responsive enough to do what it was purpose built for -
| read a book. It _can_ do other things, but it 's not made or
| marketed to do them, so they keep the cost low by not
| innovating on responsiveness. Instead, they make it more
| comfortable to use in other ways, such as how it's held and
| navigated, and the backlight.
| tonymet wrote:
| There are many high-quality products at a competitive cost.
| That's a pathetic excuse.
|
| A lot of time was spent integrating social features that no
| one uses. That time could have been spent on quality &
| latency.
|
| I understand their business goals and objectives. It's still
| a low-quality product.
|
| A profitable product can also be terrible.
| Tagbert wrote:
| from what I've read, responsive screen refresh is inversely
| related to battery life. A more responsive screen results
| in less battery life. Amazon, and pretty much all other
| eink readers have prioritized battery life over absolute
| responsiveness.
|
| They have made significant improvements in responsiveness
| over the years. Do you remember how slow screen refreshes
| were on the original Kindle? It's just that that is not a
| high priority for their main use case of linear reading.
|
| If you want to use it for reading PDF reference books, you
| probably should look to one of the eink Android tablets
| that are more general purpose devices and may have a faster
| refresh rate.
| jsheard wrote:
| There's also an inverse correlation between response time
| and image quality with e-ink, speeding up the display
| comes at the cost of more smearing/ghosting. There's
| often a software option to tweak that balance one way or
| the other depending on your preference.
| hex4def6 wrote:
| As someone who worked on them a decade ago:
|
| To be clear, the displays are not created by Amazon /
| Lab126. Instead, they're a product of Eink Holdings, Inc.
|
| From what I remember, most of the screen refresh algorithms
| etc are Eink IP. And by the way, the cost of the display
| module alone was eye-watering, especially when compared
| with LCD displays...
|
| With e-ink, you can drive it faster, at the expense of
| massive power consumption or terrible ghosting /
| artifacting. You're not going to get the 6 weeks of use out
| of a battery doing that.
|
| For reading a book, smudges / ghosting sucks, so they
| optimize for full screen refreshes just often enough to
| clear that up (that's when the screen goes black then
| white, followed by the update).
|
| It's kind of a physics based fundamental limitation -- the
| display is closer to a mechanical display of old than an
| LCD.
|
| The kindle is a product that does one thing well: display
| static text in any lighting condition with a similar
| quality to the printed page.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Kindle is now the kleenex of ebook readers, certainly not a bad
| product by any stretch.
| tonymet wrote:
| what qualities are good? I admit they have a good ebook
| selection , networking features are good, and the price point
| is good when on discount.
|
| But the software is awful and the application of the eink
| hardware is terrible too.
| sokoloff wrote:
| It's a better book than actual books for 98+% of books I've
| read on it.
|
| Taking as many books as I want onto an airplane for a
| business trip is great. My kids and wife read theirs
| literally daily. I'd have to look up how old they are, but
| the newest one is 2 years old and I think mine is around 10
| (it's a first gen paper white).
|
| The e-ink display updates fast enough to not distract me
| from reading. The battery lasts multiple business trips,
| even on my very old unit.
|
| I'm surprised how negatively you feel about it, given my
| and my family's very good experiences.
| tonymet wrote:
| The ability to take a library with me is great,
| obviously. I also primarily read on kindle.
|
| The complaints I have are all qualities within their
| control that seem to be lagging due to neglect
| (responsiveness, UI, stability, degrading performance
| over time, keyboard, search)
|
| Now ignore the library aspect and compare reading a
| single book to reading a single e-book and the gaps will
| be more visible.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I was recently given a physical book as part of a work-
| related book club and took it along with my Kindle on a
| family vacation in April, so I ended up doing a direct
| comparison. The physical book was not better than a
| Kindle version would have been. It was bigger, heavier,
| was only one book, was harder to read in the evening,
| harder to highlight passages and find them later. I think
| the only thing is the around double resolution of the
| print version, where the Kindle's ~300dpi is entirely
| passable, and the fact that the book's "battery life" is
| >100 years while the Kindle needs charging once per
| month. Still a big Kindle win.
| amenhotep wrote:
| You really threw me for a second with talking about your
| kids reading and then saying "I'd have to look up how old
| they are, but the newest one is two years old"!
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Depends on your perspective. If you sell kindles you
| probably are pretty pleased with almost 100 million units
| sold. Not a lot of products get those numbers. It sold
| quite successfully I'd say.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| What are you trying to do with it that you're concluding it's a
| "bad product" due to the slow refresh times? Kindles have
| always been the benchmark ebook reader and the most common
| piece of e-ink technology that you can actually buy. Hardly a
| "bad product" in any dimension that matters in business terms.
| tonymet wrote:
| Successful doesn't necessarily mean good. the UI is slow. It
| crashes with large books. The hardware is seemingly under-
| powered. The OS degrades in usability over time. Search
| indexing is poor. The lack of responsiveness makes the
| keyboard unusable.
|
| I've heard similar pitfalls about Kindle Scribe, the write-
| able Kindle.
| pnw wrote:
| I use a Kindle Scribe almost every day, have read dozens
| and dozens of books and documents on it. Maybe we have
| different expectations but I love mine and take it
| everywhere. It's never crashed.
|
| When I am trying to focus on reading a book, I appreciate
| that the Kindle doesn't have too many bells and whistles. I
| don't want notifications popping off and the distraction of
| fast Internet access.
| darby_eight wrote:
| They've been the benchmark for amazon kindle books. They suck
| for pdfs or anything with graphics.
| tonymet wrote:
| Again, you're confusing market success with quality. Many
| beautiful products fail and many awful products succeed.
|
| I'm talking about aesthetics. In this case, elegance,
| utility, responsiveness, durability, efficiency .
| Tagbert wrote:
| you are confusing your needs with the use case of the
| Kindle which is heavily focused on linear reading of text,
| mostly fiction. Graphics and PDFs are much lower on the
| priority scale.
| darby_eight wrote:
| > Graphics and PDFs are much lower on the priority scale.
|
| Unless of course you read books that have graphics or
| come in pdf form.
| t-3 wrote:
| PDFs and comics are not a small use case at all - the
| push to larger screens is mostly driven by people who
| want to read scientific papers, business documents, etc
| which come in pdf form, or manga and other graphical
| works (the drive for color ereaders seems to come almost
| entirely from this segment). The smaller "ebook only"
| readers are much cheaper and marketed less aggressively.
| ByThyGrace wrote:
| E-ink devices have improved a lot over the last 10 years,
| across the board: refresh rate, latency, computing power,
| responsiveness, you name it.
| tonymet wrote:
| Indeed, and though Kindle has improved, it hasn't improved by
| much. I've owned 4 generations and they are all a bit better,
| especially when new.
|
| It's the same complaint people make about iOS devices
| degrading to force upgrades.
|
| I don't think it's deliberate but I do think it's
| deliberately neglected.
| dools wrote:
| > Does anyone know why the Kindle is such a bad product?
|
| Because it's made by Amazon
| mcast wrote:
| To be fair, the Kindle is primarily used for reading books
| and doesn't require a fast refresh rate. It also lasts for
| weeks (months?) without charging.
| tonymet wrote:
| It's not about refresh rate it's about responsiveness. As
| close to 0ms as possible. On kindle there's a frustrating
| amount of input lag
| TillE wrote:
| The response you're waiting for is a refresh of the
| screen.
|
| The Kindle excels at being a low-cost device for reading
| novels, or linear non-fiction with no graphics etc. For
| anything fancier, it's simply not built for that.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I used few ebooks and Kindle is the only one that actually
| works as expected. Some ebooks I used drained battery in few
| days, not delivering promise of long life. Some ebooks were
| just crap and broke after few months. Kindle works few weeks
| from one charge for my use (1-2 hours of reading per day), it's
| water-proof so I can read my books while taking a bath
| (priceless). I never had any particular issues with it.
|
| Its UI seems oriented to promote Amazon Store and I never used
| it, sending books over e-mail and deleting after read, that's
| OK with me. I'd prefer for its library to have folders and I'd
| prefer for it to work as USB stick like other ebooks do, so I
| can connect it to PC and organize things inside as I want, but
| those are not necessary.
|
| So may be Kindle is bad, but rest are worse, I don't know a
| single ebook brand of Amazon scale. They all seem to be Chinese
| no-names which come and go without investments to quality and
| reputation.
| tonymet wrote:
| I agree with all of this, and I've noticed as much with the
| other readers. Some users promote Kobo reader as a quality
| alternative, but I haven't tried it.
| lidavidm wrote:
| Kobo works quite well: you can set it up without an account
| (needs a bit of manual fiddling) if you really want, and
| either way after that you can just plug it in and drag-and-
| drop epubs to the device. Battery life, responsiveness,
| etc. are all fine to me (the older devices actually did a
| bit better IMO and it mostly only gets bogged down for
| comics, regular books are fine)
| hex4def6 wrote:
| Yeah.
|
| I like tools that do one thing well. The Kindle has hit that
| spot for a long time. There were incremental improvements
| (faster processor, 3G/4G, front light, higher DPI / contrast,
| etc), but it's surprising how similar a 2010 kindle is to a
| 2024 one.
| graypegg wrote:
| I use a pocketbook right now, and was using quite a few kobos
| over the years prior. At least with those, I've noticed that
| we've kinda reached some ceiling for responsiveness, and I
| think it's the software/computing hardware not the screen
| hardware causing it. Stuff like page turns can be quite fast,
| but closing out of a book and opening another really feels like
| you're straining the poor thing.
|
| Pocketbook particularly takes ages to reflow text if you rotate
| it. I think it's reflowing the entire ebook to get page numbers
| + chapter positions? Very annoying if you forget to turn off
| the accelerometer.
| green-salt wrote:
| It becomes a much more stable device when you jailbreak it and
| put something like KOReader. You can put books on it with
| Calibre or just SFTP afterwards.
| pquki4 wrote:
| I don't know which kindle you have, but my Scribe is noticably
| faster than the Oasis 2nd gen from 2017. Almost makes me want
| to replace the Oasis with the latest Paperwhite.
| tonymet wrote:
| my paperwhite 2022(ish) seemed faster than the previous one
| (2017?) but now it's nearly as bad
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I want to make a Compact Mac clone with an eink display like
| this. How wonderful would that look.
| afandian wrote:
| I'd settle for an eink Newton.
| WillAdams wrote:
| I'd be glad of a contemporary device w/ a b/w LED --- still
| saddened that there wasn't a replacement for the Asus Eee
| Note EA800 --- and I'm still annoyed that Apple has yet to
| make a device to replace my Newton (at a minimum, I'd want
| Apple Pencil support on an iPhone (or iPod Touch if they'd
| bring that back) or Mini iPad), but using something other
| than an LCD for daylight viewability would be something I'd
| be glad of (trying to out-bright the sun on a battery-powered
| device is just as stupid as it sounds to my mind).
| tonymet wrote:
| or reboot Palm pilot
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| It can look good [1] but I haven't yet seen the refresh rate of
| eInk that I thought could handle a moving cursor. Maybe with
| the right driver you can these days.
|
| [1] https://engineersneedart.com/systemsix/systemsix.html
| thetinymite wrote:
| I think this is the original repo:
| https://gitlab.com/zephray/glider
|
| based on this tweet:
| https://twitter.com/zephray_wenting/status/17901730074884506...
| SushiHippie wrote:
| The GitHub repository description also says:
|
| > Open-source E-ink monitor. Mirror of
| https://gitlab.com/zephray/glider
| megous wrote:
| On the other end of the spectrum, there are production devices
| driving eInk displays using a regular LCD controllers. :)))
|
| Anyway, I appretiate the waveform format documentation and tools.
| Might kick me back to working on my Pocketbook display driver.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| So so grateful for the open sourcing of all the knowledge about
| Eink in your brain zephray!!!
|
| So much great information in your readme about Eink. I've already
| read a decent bit of it, and am going to reference it for the
| years to come!
| OptCohTomo wrote:
| "Optical teardown of a Kindle Paperwhite display by OCT":
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.05174 OCT = Optical Coherence
| Tomography This paper shows what is going on inside the display.
| rkagerer wrote:
| What a great primer in the readme!
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