I’d like to get an ebook reader, but for some reason, every one of them on the market has a poison pill about it. Of course, the logical course of action would be to engineer my own that doesn’t suck. This brings me to the problem of the required e-ink displays. Does anyone here know a good source for small quantities of e-ink displays? eink.com sells prototyping kits for $3000 apiece, which is rather out of my budget.
I just wanted to chime in that I would love this also. I dunno if Sparkfun would be able to get them for us at some reasonable price though.
eInk is not the only place that makes them, so maybe SparkFun can find a deal. For instance [Prime View Int. claims to be making them now. (None of their distributers seem to carry them, though. So maybe it’s all hype.)
A big problem is that a large matrix display pretty much requires special driver circuitry, if they’re considering those interfaces as “trade secrets” it makes it pretty worthless to the hobbiest.
I wonder if there are any existing ePaper book-readers that can be torn apart for their displays?](http://www.pvi.com.tw)
Me too.
Also the film.
Take some transparent conductive plastic (relatively available), place over the eink panel.
Place a 2 layer PCB under the glued-on eink panel.
Voila - segment display.
All you need is ±15V drive to turn a segment on or off.
Though panels would be cool too.