Of course I wouldn’t want to us an epaper display on a desktop replacement and I also understand the all the epaper displays are SparkX and so isn’t too much support for them. I’m just curious because I can use an rpi with an and use an ereader like FBReader very easily. If I could display the FBReader application (or any ereader application) on an epaper display that would be absolutely amazing! There’s plenty of documentation on drawing/displaying presaved images onto epaper but I’d like to show desktop applications.
I know I’d have to hack my own driver and likely mangle a device overlay, but I wanted to ask if someone with more experience could chime in about other things I’d need to consider
I suppose you could and you could even make your own open source e-book with a large enough display. Not sure it would be worth the trouble, even a Pi Zero uses a fairly significant amount of current and that would eat into battery life pretty quick. The small savings you get using e-paper over LCD might not make much of an impact if the controller is still using a bulk of your battery.
With a low power controller, you might have something though. Maybe an Artemis along with some sort of low power WiFi module and SD storage would work? Then you have a super low power controller + a low power display. Might potentially be able to run for weeks on just a few AA batteries.
I’ve had similar thoughts. I would want a board that can run minimal GNU/linux images to take advantage of all the software out there. If it’s an artemis or another low-power MCU then I’d have to write all the software from scratch :roll:. Linux would inherently be less power efficient that an MCU but I think the tradeoff with software capabilities would be worth it.
I guess an linux board to MCU is possible but I’d assume that would be more complicated than driving an epaper display directly