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Someone would make a killing of they created an easy to use home dashboard with an eink display. Low power, 8x11, customizable with Android apps. Refreshes once a minute. Has weather and traffic and calendar in the morning, and displays photos in the afternoon.
LCDs are terrible in terms of power consumption. But a big, slow eink would be great.
Android eink tablets already exist, have done for years. It's expensive and doesn't work as well as you want. The eink company owns patents that keeps everything expensive.
See, I don't want a tablet. Tablet implies fast refresh rates, minimal ghosting, fast processor, etc.
It's a different purpose than a screen I can stick on a wall and only look at a few times in the morning. That lower quality on the panel and hardware should bring costs on the tech lower.
Hell, I don't even really need 8 shades of color.
If someone can stick a low power processor on there and make it run on some rechargeable AAAs, even better.
Just to be clear, the costs are in licensing the eink tech from the company that owns the patents. The processors in the eink tablets available today are not expensive processors.
It's the display that is prohibitively and arbitrarily expensive. None of the other variables matter since all of the low power / retain image advantage is solely because of that display.
And large e-ink displays will remain niche, simply because of the company's pricing.
So... Someone needs to sue them for a monopoly? Seems pretty cut and dry.
I don't think it really applies to patent holders. The company doesn't make the displays -- they license their patent to the companies that make the displays. The licensing cost is what causes the displays to remain expensive, but I'm not sure this counts as a monopoly. I'm not a lawyer, but it seems like patent holders can do pretty much what they like with the patent (and indeed, that kind of seems like the whole point of a patent).
Sounds like Patents need to be changed then. Especially for variations of normal technology. Like, someone should not be able to patent a new variation of an OLED display. But, if you create a NEW product (E.x something that literally doesn't exist yet that creates a new market) then you can patent that. And, patents should expire in 3 years, hard limitation.
Well, those products didn't exist when they made eink displays. The whole point of a patent is to grant a temporary monopoly in exchange for the patent holder making details of the invention public. The patent holder gets a monopoly on producing and selling that thing so they can recoup their investment, and competitors can make derivatives after the patent period.
If a product already exists, you can't patent it because it falls under the "prior art" restriction.
That said, I absolutely agree that patents should have a much shorter duration. I think the right number is somewhere in the 5-7 year range, but others certainly have different opinions. What I'd like is an actual, national discussion about it instead of just random ranting on social media.
No disagreements! It does seem like an area that needs improvement.
A patent is a state-granted monopoly.
“I own the only patent - I will license it for just $10/square inch.”
And that’s a short story about how eInk never got commercialized.
I'm not so sure, I think it would go the way of smart speakers - a solution without much of a problem to solve
You say that as though people aren't buying the shit out of them
I agree it's kind of a dumb product, but people buy the shit out of smart speakers. Their market size in 2022 was 10.8 billion USD and rising every year.
I could absolutely see a consumer driven home wall panel selling like crazy - I have a HA driven wall panel at my house and every guest thinks it's the coolest thing and asks where they can get one
What's an ha driven panel?
Sorry, Home Assistant - it's a self hosted home automation platform.
Supports practically every smart device out there, can be totally self hosted, and has a great framework for building home automation dashboards for phones and tablets
I've got an instance running on my network and a few cheap Fire tablets running the HA app as wall panels mounted around my house, they display the weather and family photos by default, but when you touch them they have controls for all our smart lights, thermostat, etc
My house came with air-conditioning controlled by an absolute piece of shit android tablet connected to the air con unit by an ethernet cable running through a hole in the wall which also powers the tablet. It runs as the server for a proprietary app called ezone that you can connect clients to by downloading the ezone app from the play store on other devices. It frequently decides it can't use the wifi (despite being connected to it) and therefore can't communicate with the clients for about 3-6 months at a time before it randomly works again, it also changes the temperature from whatever you asked for, to 18C about 20 seconds after you turn it on so you have to stand there for 20 seconds ready to catch it and change the temperature back. I hate it!
The reason I mention this is, is there any way I could somehow rig up this Home Assistant software to work with the aircon via this ethernet cable? I called the company that installed the crap I got stuck with and they don't exist anymore but someone else took them over and to get a replacement tablet costs something in the order of $600 AUD. I tried to investigate getting my own android tablet but I'd have to first find a way to get the server software off the old tablet (I wonder if I can just pull the APK off and transfer it to another device?) and still somehow have the whole endeavour cost less then just paying the bastards for a replacement piece of shit, which was surprisingly harder than I thought it'd be.
Possibly, what's the brand of this crazy setup?
Well I think I should probably avoid saying the company name that sells the air-conditioning system with the bullshit app and tablet as a package only because it's fairly specific to where I live but the app is called ezone and when I called them about replacement and balked at the outrageous cost they said it's because they have the tablets put together for them so they're custom and not mass produced the same way as an off the shelf tablet. If you go in to the settings on android for it and the about section it says the model number is just ezone1.
They have it pretty well sewn up.i love controlling the aircon from any room easily but the bullshit with the broken connectivity and secretly changing my temperature to 18c all the time is enough that I'd rather have had a traditional IR remote with a digital clock style display. At least it works reliably.
You know what else sucks about this thing? Obviously it doesn't need to be fast or high performance, but they cheaped out so much that it barely manages to run the only app it's supposed to run. When we first got it, it was slow and unreliable and connected only intermittently (rather than solidly for months followed by not at all for months) so we updated the app, but now they've updated the app to have little animations and it's too much for the tablet to bear and it almost crashes trying to run a little spinning fan animation and takes forever to wake from the lock screen. So dumb, why make it do that when you know exactly what hardware a huge proportion of the user base will be stuck with? I'm sure if you bought it now the tablet might be slightly better but what am I supposed to do? I'm not paying a goddamn ransom to be able to operate my otherwise perfectly functional airconditioning. A machine that controls temperature is supposed to be the impressive hard to make part not the damned control surface.
Transfering the APK should be easy if you can launch other apps. Installing it and authenticating may be proprietary...
Phones kind of suck for the 'at a glance' function.
Smart home dashboards also seem like a perfect fit with this. A low power, regular refreshing, touch sensitive controlled? That could hang on a wall with a battery? Sounds great.
This would be great for those of us with Home Assistant or other home automation setups. Still not a huge market, but a market none the less.
I build a digital picture frame using an 8-color e-ink display and a pi pico.
It works great within its limitations, but the limitations are still pretty big
Obviously a commercial product could probably do better, or a better screen, but faster-refresh or higher-color tends to jump in price quickly.
Still, it was pretty cool to have a device that would not need power to persist images, and used only a little during the process of loading new ones so could be powered by battery/solar
I’ve thought of doing something similar, the other fun part is that you could stash a big battery behind the display and run the E-ink on a super slow refresh rate since they only use power to refresh. I wish E-ink wasn’t so ridiculously expensive. This monitor would be perfect if it weren’t $1200.
This is the one I got. It's not terribly expensive but yeah it does have limitations in terms of colors and refresh times
You're on the same wavelength as me. My ideal product is an e-ink display to stick in the kitchen or some other high traffic area to display relevant family information and with touch controls to do some fairly basic things like toggle digital switches/dials or just switch to alternative dashboards. If I could find a touch-enabled e-ink display that's a good size but not stupid expensive (keeping in mind this is absolutely a luxury item so I'm not looking to shell out any significant volume of monies on the thing), I could attach one to a Pi and make one myself.
Sounds cool until you realize that you’d have to turn on the lights to read it at night.
If only there wAs soMe technOLogy out thEre already Doing that…
I think a 27x40 inch movie poster size would be awesome to line the walls of a home theater. Have posters on rotation. Similarly have some posted for artwork. Basically digital picture frames but not lcd/led driven. I’m sure the quality is low now, but once color accuracy is fine tuned, would be some cool niche uses.
I was just thinking the other day about using e-ink for a smart watch display.
You could dig around for a used pebble watch. Apparently they still work with modern phones
Amazfit and Fossil and othes have them, but I really miss the pebble
Can't you buy that from Boox?