[HN Gopher] Modos Paper Monitor - Open-hardware e-paper monitor ...
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Modos Paper Monitor - Open-hardware e-paper monitor and dev kit
Author : RossBencina
Score : 308 points
Date : 2025-08-08 12:38 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.crowdsupply.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.crowdsupply.com)
| sandos wrote:
| It seems to update fast, but with significant ghosting, right?
| Looking at the cat example. Maybe this is just the best e-ink can
| do, and thats fine!
| swinglock wrote:
| It looks amazing for e-ink. You'd probably don't want this for
| video anyway, besides it's not even in color. I'm impressed
| that it works at all. For a lot of work though it could be
| amazing, depending on your environment.
|
| Say you'd want to pop outside in the nice weather to do some
| programming. You quickly find why that wasn't as glamorous as
| you expected. But if you had a laptop with such a screen I
| would expect it to work great.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| What about syntax highlighting?
| 3abiton wrote:
| That indeed would be my issue with it for programming.
| swinglock wrote:
| I don't require it myself but that's a concern, it's nice
| to have. Maybe someone can build an editor that uses
| different fonts within one file instead of different
| colors. Could be something out there for color blind folks
| already, though seeing no colors at all is unusual. But
| e-ink has grayscales so you could at least make comments a
| bit lighter, I think I'd be happy with that.
| balou23 wrote:
| There's plenty of options available. A coworker of mine
| used to print out code for reviews. You can use italic,
| bold and underline as alternative to colors. Grayscale
| might work nicely for eInk too - for laser printers just
| thin/regular/bold probably works better.
|
| Other fonts... I could see myself being distracted by
| changing fonts in a document, except maybe for comment
| blocks. But for those italic/thin seems to work well
| already.
|
| Tried to find the tool... it's GNU enscript. Syntax
| highlighting for several languages, outputs to
| postscript.
| swinglock wrote:
| I like your idea better.
| alex-a-soto wrote:
| I didn't know about GNU Enscript, going to check it out.
| Thanks!
| OJFord wrote:
| I'd do 3 greys, from lightest to darkest: comments,
| syntactical cruft like braces, semicolons, certain
| keywords, etc., and then 'actual' code, variable names
| and so on.
|
| Much more variation than that with 256 colours is mostly
| just making it pretty rather than offering helpful
| distinction imo.
| dspillett wrote:
| You have the option of a few greyscale levels, bold, pehaps
| italic, and depending on font maybe extra-bold and light.
| That should be enough for the essentials, though it will
| feel like a downgrade if you have got used to a richly
| colourful environment and rely on it for reasons other than
| liking it being pretty.
| camgunz wrote:
| I built a colorscheme for Vim [0] that is close to
| monochrome when I was worried about blue light (I've since
| had kids and now this kind of worry doesn't rate at all),
| and I basically use bold and highlights (I hate
| underlining, italics, and squiggles, but I think you can do
| all that too in the GUI version). I found it surprisingly
| usable.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/camgunz/amber
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| > in the GUI version
|
| or in the TUI version, in a terminal like Kitty.
|
| I want to try some monochrome UI, but that amber is
| definitely not my taste. Let me see if there is a "paper-
| like" theme, or maybe I can make one myself.
| camgunz wrote:
| I (re)built it w/ a little script I call roygvim [0] --
| here's the source [1]
|
| [0]: https://github.com/camgunz/roygvim
|
| [1]: https://pastebin.com/b0LRpjUC
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| My attempt:
|
| https://images2.imgbox.com/16/79/Tz7rMe2c_o.png
| colorscheme paper highlight Normal
| guibg=#f7f5f0 guifg=#000000 gui=NONE
| highlight CursorLine guibg=#f0efea gui=NONE
| highlight CursorColumn guibg=#f0efea gui=NONE
| highlight Comment guifg=#777777 gui=italic
| highlight Constant guifg=#333333 gui=underline
| highlight String guifg=#333333 gui=italic
| highlight Character guifg=#333333 gui=italic
| highlight Number guifg=#333333 gui=underline
| highlight Boolean guifg=#333333 gui=underline
| highlight Float guifg=#333333 gui=underline
| highlight Identifier guifg=#000000 gui=NONE
| highlight Function guifg=#000000 gui=bold
| highlight Statement guifg=#000000 gui=bold
| highlight Conditional guifg=#000000 gui=bold,underline
| highlight Repeat guifg=#000000 gui=bold
| highlight Label guifg=#000000 gui=bold
| highlight Operator guifg=#000000 gui=NONE
| highlight Keyword guifg=#000000 gui=bold
| highlight PreProc guifg=#333333 highlight
| Include guifg=#333333 gui=underline
| highlight Define guifg=#333333 gui=underline
| highlight Macro guifg=#333333 gui=underline
| highlight PreCondit guifg=#333333 gui=underline
| highlight Type guifg=#000000 gui=bold,italic
| highlight StorageClass guifg=#000000 gui=bold
| highlight Structure guifg=#000000 gui=bold
| highlight Typedef guifg=#000000 gui=bold
| highlight Special guifg=#333333 gui=italic
| highlight SpecialChar guifg=#333333 gui=italic
| highlight Tag guifg=#333333 gui=italic
| highlight Delimiter guifg=#000000 gui=NONE
| highlight SpecialComment guifg=#777777 gui=italic
| highlight Debug guifg=#333333 gui=italic
| highlight Underlined guifg=#000000 gui=underline
| highlight Error guifg=#000000 gui=bold,underline
| highlight Todo guifg=#000000 gui=bold,italic
| highlight Visual guibg=#d0d0d0 guifg=#000000 gui=NONE
| highlight IncSearch guibg=#d0d0d0 guifg=#000000 gui=NONE
| alex-a-soto wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! Would it be alright if I try it out
| during our livestream this week?
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| Yes sure. public domain.
| clueless wrote:
| this is not the same technology as e-ink, hence why they call
| it e-paper
| alex-a-soto wrote:
| It's an electrophoretic display, in the category of
| e-paper, informally called e-ink, made by the company E
| Ink.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper#Electrophore
| t...
| bbarnett wrote:
| There's a lot better being done by Boox, and even with colour
| e-ink in terms of ghosting. I think a lot of that is software
| end, though.
|
| The one unfortunate thing is that this monitor seems to have a
| glossy screen, not matte, but maybe that's an additional layer
| over a dev kit?
|
| If this truly is 'open', then it should be trivial to write
| special X11/Wayland drivers for it, to handle a lot of the
| ghosting issues at that end. I think Boox actually refreshes
| portions of screens, and a double or triple video buffer in
| X/Wayland could do the same.
|
| (One problem with Boox is their relentless phone-home to
| servers in China, which cannot be disable by normal means.)
| swinglock wrote:
| Damn shame, because otherwise they look brilliant, I would
| have wanted one. Thanks for the warning.
| dspillett wrote:
| Another problem with Boox is the disregard of the
| requirements of the GPL family of licences. I've been
| interested in some of their devices but won't touch them due
| to that (and now due to the issue you stated - though I was
| unaware there was un-disablable "telemetry", I'd have to look
| into that if they ever did something about the lack of GPL
| compliance).
| DrJaws wrote:
| they didn't, they even said something like "lol we don't
| care, we will never make things open source".
| foolswisdom wrote:
| Can you tell us more about the phoning home?
| DrJaws wrote:
| it's not much different than a samsung device phoning their
| servers for every thing the device does.
|
| but in this case as it does to china, people are a bit
| paranoid. usually mostly is their cloud services for
| notetaking or some push notifications.
|
| but I think I remember people saying they could disable
| everything by rooting the devices.
| DrJaws wrote:
| boox devices are not even close to 75hz though
|
| not even the latest ones like tab x c
| RossBencina wrote:
| The dev kit works with most if not all eink panels. You are
| not limited to the panels shipped in this launch.
|
| It is fully open, the full source code, gateware and hardware
| designs are on github: https://github.com/Modos-Labs/Glider
| alex-a-soto wrote:
| Thanks! Yes, it does update quickly, and ghosting is still an
| issue, though I think there's room for improvement on the
| OS/software side. I gave a talk at the Linux App Summit earlier
| this year where I shared some ideas for how this could work.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7xTs9-2AgU
| bbarnett wrote:
| I think, if you look at Boox and how they have display
| options and config for each app, you could do this for X11
| quite easily. Especially a custom backend video driver which
| flattens to greyscale, and distinguishes change on a per app
| basis.
|
| An incredibly hacky thing, is that (as an example) Sawfish is
| an immensely extensible window manager. You can literally
| drop in lisp code linking actions by tagging on window names,
| application names, and so on.
|
| So you could actually extend sawfish quite easily, and then
| do what Boox is doing. Change per-window methods of refresh,
| by interfacing with the backend video driver in X11, and so
| on.
|
| I think a lot of people who don't use Linux, would "put up"
| with Linux if there was a way to use a framework with a
| display. So I think, strongly think, that the display of
| course and your work of course must be done, but that it
| relies very strongly on slapping together a more holistic
| environment.
|
| Just thoughts. And good luck with this.
| alex-a-soto wrote:
| Thank you for your thoughts and support. I agree, doing
| this in X11 is definitely doable. I've seen others achieve
| similar results by running a daemon that listens for damage
| regions. I hadn't considered using a custom backend video
| driver; that's something I'll be looking into.
|
| My focus has mostly been on Wayland, but possibly
| prototyping in X11 could be a starting point. Some people
| I've met are interested in using computer vision techniques
| at the hardware level, or making a camera rig.
|
| What excites me most is getting this into people's hands,
| seeing what they create with it, and working together to
| improve it and explore new use cases. One use case that I
| learned about recently:
|
| E-Ink News: The mystery of cuttlefish disguise, scientists
| use E Ink technology to explore its secrets
|
| https://www.ereaderpro.co.uk/en/blogs/news/e-ink-news-the-
| my...
| bbarnett wrote:
| Heh, neat use re: tank + fish!
| exceptione wrote:
| Being Dutch I am proud to see NLNet and the EU financially
| supporting this project.
|
| We deny ourselves so much progress by forcing smart individuals
| with a passion into conglomerates that are merely busy destroying
| competition. Small to medium sized organizations have the biggest
| potential for innovation, and look what two people even can do.
| RossBencina wrote:
| Agree, and for those who aren't aware, these grants are
| available to anyone, not limited to Netherlands residents:
| https://nlnet.nl/NGI0/
| Vinnl wrote:
| In fact, NGI is funded by the EU - NLNet just happens to be
| the org doing the handing-out.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| "EU financially supporting this project."
|
| wdym about EU funding this project, I see backer list and there
| are bunch of US citizen
| rsto wrote:
| It's an interesting project, but I'm confused why they got
| funded with EU money. Their company is based in Boston and it
| looks as both of them are living in them US, which suggests
| neither of them is European citizen or pays taxes in the EU,
| which ultimately is where the money for these grants comes
| from. The funding requirements of NLNet state "it is a knock-
| out criterion for each project to have a "European dimension
| [...] where a significant contribution towards the vision of
| the Next Generation Internet initiative also qualifies".
|
| I'm not trying to pick on this particular project, I just found
| out non-EU projects can apply at all. I hope the majority of
| NLNet money goes to projects that actually are executed in
| Europe and build expertise there.
| alex-a-soto wrote:
| Thank you for your kind words. I agree that small teams can
| achieve a lot.
|
| We're grateful to NLnet and the EU, whose support made this
| project possible and especially in overcoming complex
| challenges. We've made a point of attending conferences and
| sharing what we've learned. Now that the project is ready, we
| can focus on expanding that knowledge and collaborating with
| people everywhere.
| torium wrote:
| Not sure I understand what I'm looking at.
|
| At 0:47, which one is the e-ink, left hand side or right hand
| side? Initially I thought the e-ink was on the left hand side,
| but it has SO MUCH GLARE.
|
| Also on the intro at 0:10 you can see the glare move across as
| they tilt it.
|
| More glare: 0:26 (left) 0:28 (top left).
|
| I have an e-ink reader and it has _zero_ glare. I read it on the
| beach as clearly as paper, I 'm not exaggerating.
|
| They've done the hardest part (the latency), how don't know how
| to explain fumbling this badly on the easy part. It shouldn't
| have glass in front!!
| KolmogorovComp wrote:
| It's obviously the left one. I don't see much glare on it.
| torium wrote:
| You don't see the glare on the left hand side? Are you
| trolling me?
|
| https://imgur.com/AsMMNmi
|
| https://imgur.com/a/kHBiPmu
| technothrasher wrote:
| Their big claim, at least it seems on quick glance, is in the
| controller, not the display. You can use any e-ink display with
| it. The display with glare that you're complaining about I
| think is just the cheap display they're including in the dev
| kit.
| torium wrote:
| Oh really? I completely missed that. I thought what they were
| offering was an e-ink display with a latency that's low
| enough to use as computer screen.
|
| It's possible I just can't read.
| alex-a-soto wrote:
| At 0:47, both sides use the same e-ink panel, the left in
| outdoor conditions, and the right indoor.
|
| Latency was one of the challenges we addressed, and our driver
| board supports different panels, you can use one with lower
| glare if preferred.
| jzellis wrote:
| This would be absolutely amazing for a productivity device. I've
| rooted my Kindle Paperwhite and set it up with a terminal and
| used it to SSH into my laptop just to try it, but the latency
| makes it a bit irritating just to keep up with typing. To be able
| to use a fully graphical environment in e-paper, even in
| grayscale, would be amazing.
|
| I built a cyberdeck that primarily uses a pair of XReal AR
| glasses as its display, but to have the option to use either
| those or this would be so awesome.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Even without the advantages of e-ink, a display which one can
| view _anywhere_ is a compelling thing, which opens up a lot of
| possibilities --- my favourite Windows device was a Fujitsu
| Stylistic ST-4110 w/ a transflective LCD, which I used as my
| main computer, e-book reader, notepad
| (writing/drawing/annotating with a stylus), and map display
| when traveling.
|
| The transflective display eliminated issues regarding
| reflection or the display getting washed out by even full,
| bright, direct sunlight (I would use it for reference material
| for building sand castles at the beach).
|
| Unfortunately, transflective LCDs do _not_ showroom well (dim)
| and no one seemed willing to make the investment to show their
| capabilities (build a daylight-equivalent light booth on the
| store floor).
|
| I keep eyeing a Daylight Computer, but these days, I just use a
| Kindle Scribe for reading and note-taking/sketching/reference,
| and I limit my activities when in full sun to those things
| which it can do well, changing location/finding shade when I
| need to do other things.
| RossBencina wrote:
| Are you familiar with Sun Vision RLCD displays? They seem to
| get good reviews. Not cheap though:
| https://www.sunvisiondisplay.com/
| WillAdams wrote:
| I wish that someone would use an updated (high-resolution)
| one to make a battery-powered tablet which uses a Wacom EMR
| stylus.
| afandian wrote:
| HannsNote2 looks amazing in the sunshine. But very slow
| processor and very low capacity battery. It's a niche use
| case but great for a couple of hours of KOReader in the sun.
|
| https://www.hannspree.com/product/hannsnote2
| Igrom wrote:
| Can you showcase the cyberdeck? I've found a post by you on
| Twitter, but I don't know if you demo it elsewhere.
| lagniappe wrote:
| I use a similar setup :) Have you done a blog post or anything?
| criddell wrote:
| > I built a cyberdeck
|
| Have you written about this anywhere? If not, I'd love to see a
| ShowHN post about your project and I bet I'm not the only one.
|
| What's your background? I ask because I really want something
| like a TRS-80 Model 100. Is interfacing a low end (power
| efficient) board to an LCD or eInk display something an
| electronics neophyte could reasonably take on?
|
| A lot of homemade slab computers seem to rely on Raspberry Pi
| boards but those draw quite a lot of power and tend to run
| Linux. It's not a combination that I'm going to be able to run
| for weeks at a time on 4 AA batteries (one of my goals).
|
| When building your cyberdeck, were there any resources in
| particular that you found helpful?
| newsclues wrote:
| Looks like they would be good for Home Assistant dashboards.
| voxadam wrote:
| Maybe if they supported touch.
| newsclues wrote:
| Not really, not everyone likes or wants touch, and the
| fingerprints on screens.
|
| Switches, buttons, sliders and knobs are excellent physical
| input devices when used properly.
| Escapade5160 wrote:
| Soldered Inkplate is a solid option for anyone wanting a device
| with Wi-Fi, backlight, touch screen, battery, and runs arduino or
| micro python. Recently set one up as a display that updates if
| I'm in a meeting or free that I hang on my office door.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| Also shout out to https://usetrmnl.com/ which is much cheaper
| than OP if all you need is a display that updates every 5+
| minutes. The founder is a really cool guy and cares a lot about
| this project
| RossBencina wrote:
| Looks like my post got a second chance. I'm not affiliated with
| the project, but I am an interested e-ink monitor enthusiast.
|
| You may be interested to know that this project is a fully open
| project, all source code, verilog, algorithm documentation and
| hardware design files are on github:
|
| https://github.com/Modos-Labs/Glider
| https://gitlab.com/zephray/caster
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I talked to my wife constantly about how badly I want an e-ink
| monitor, they're just still so expensive for the specs I want
| haha. I'd take a solid 24", maybe 21", b&w 30hz at this point
| if the price was right (sub-$500).
| alex-a-soto wrote:
| Yeah, to get a 24" e-ink monitor anywhere near that price,
| we'd need much higher production volumes. Right now, it just
| isn't mass-produced enough to bring costs down to the
| sub-$500 range.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I totally understand the limitations there, i'm just
| spelling out what I'd like!
| alex-a-soto wrote:
| Three years ago, I posted about modding a ThinkPad T480 into an
| e-ink laptop: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26245563
|
| That turned into a community project and eventually into
| building our own FPGA-based e-ink display controller to improve
| refresh speed and reduce ghosting.
|
| The result is a dev kit and monitor: open hardware, supports
| 6-13" monochrome and color e-ink panels over HDMI or USB-C, up
| to 75 Hz with sub-100 ms latency, and includes a C API.
|
| Hardware, firmware, docs and schematics:
| https://github.com/Modos-Labs/Glider
| Palomides wrote:
| I'm probably getting one for desktop use, but I'm also
| curious for other use cases, what's the power usage like?
| while idle or doing high frame rate video?
| alex-a-soto wrote:
| Great! The board uses about 1-1.5W under continuous use
| with no OS/kernel power optimizations.
| RossBencina wrote:
| The devboard shipped with this kit has USB Type-C DisplayPort and
| DVI via microHDMI, both provided by off-the-shelf interface ICs.
| I would love to see a version that can take LVDS from a typical
| laptop motherboard to allow for modding a laptop (maybe a
| Framework 13)? The design appears to use a low-end FPGA with
| fairly modest resource usage, so I suspect it is technically
| feasible to interface video LVDS direct to the FPGA. I'm not sure
| about the power requirements however.
| wtallis wrote:
| The Type-C DP input appears to be using a DP to LVDS converter,
| so the FPGA is already accepting LVDS, it just doesn't expose a
| connector for it. But for interfacing with laptops, these days
| it's eDP that matters, not LVDS. So the issue is mostly the
| mismatch between an internal eDP connector vs the board's
| type-C connector.
| lemonberry wrote:
| There was a really neat post here from November of last year
| about a person making an e-ink display for his mother with
| amnesia. It may be of interest if you like this stuff.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42135520
| perching_aix wrote:
| Really impressed by how fast epaper is these days, but the demo
| video really doesn't look refresh rate compliant at 60 Hz.
| alex-a-soto wrote:
| We have some other videos, with more to come this week.
|
| Generative Forest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fLYVwh4XCE
|
| Return of the Obra Dinn
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClK8lDJWJcw
| qwertytyyuu wrote:
| 75hz woah
| ryanckulp wrote:
| we bought a couple of these at TRMNL for testing purposes ;)
| alex-a-soto wrote:
| Can't wait to see what you have in mind ;)
| arkensaw wrote:
| I'm disappointed by how expensive these things still are.
| Smartphone size eink panels are so cheap that every supermarket
| has thousands of them as price display panels. but try and find
| epaper bigger than 10" and you'll be paying $350+ just for a
| panel that does nothing by itself.
| system2 wrote:
| Can't do anything with eink in the USA because of the patents.
| This is very frustrating.
| oojuliuso wrote:
| Why Amazon can't use its economies of scale to build a Kindle
| monitor that devs and writers would early adopt like wildfire is
| a strange curiosity.
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(page generated 2025-08-12 23:00 UTC)