I’ve been looking at the new eInk technology and it looks very neat but unfortunatelly not very available.
[eInk Corp(the main producer) only has one thing listed and that is the 3000$ prototype kit :shock:
The reason it’s this costly is because it includes a whole lot of other pretty useless stuff other than the display. If you want to order displays they won’t even talk to you if you aren’t a company
Any chance of SparkFun selling us eInk displays to play around with? :D](http://www.eink.com/)
I’d just like to keep this thread current. I can think of many good uses for these and I’d LOVE to have even just a simple LCD character replacement but a decent graphics module with a serial protocol would be just fine too.
I’m writing support for graphic VFD’s at the moment, but I like these things a lot.
So, it’s a year later. Sony has released their 2nd gen PRS-505, the Amazon Kindle just came out, and there are several other devices out on the market that use e-ink display tech.
Any chance you can get your hands on a batch of surplus e-ink displays to sell us?
Agreed. Colour and refresh rate aren’t why you’d choose E-ink.
E-ink displays only consume power when changing the image; OLED is an emissive technology so it needs sustained power to display anything. Once an E-ink display is “written” to, it’ll hold the image until explicitly changed to something different. Heck, you can slash an E-ink display and still read the last image it displayed. Which digital map would you rather be reading from out in the middle of the wilderness or urban jungle?
Also bare in mind that contrast ratio is a measure of a display’s lightest colour relative to it’s darkest colour; it’s not an absolute metric. Because an E-ink display is a reflective(white)/absorptive(black) technology, you’re not going to have any difficulty reading it in even the brightest sunlight - the brightness of the sun determines the brightness of your whites.
OLED will be easier to read than back-lit LCD, but they’re still pixel-sized LEDs competing with incident sunlight. You’ll still need to crank up the power to read it.
…and besides, Sparkfun already carries a few OLED displays. What are you waiting for?
I have seen a phone that claims an eink display, as phone screens are normally easy to get (you have several here already) would it be possible to find out more about this and get some?
Its the Motofone F3. I dont know how good the display is, but its worth checking out.
Unfortunately, all I’ve read regarding the F3 suggests that it’s a simpler segmented display approach (like old-school LCD calculators), rather than a more flexible active matrix. The segmented display is a limitation of the driving circuitry, not the E-ink imaging film itself, so it could fun to peel off the E-ink film and mess around with DIY driving circuitry.
Thats an interesting point. I dont suppose its economical to make the e-ink only in certain parts of the display, but the controller would be different.
Its magnetic control isnt it?
From my (very basic ) understanding there are tiny balls, black on one side and white on the other that are rotated by a magnetic field.
How would you go about shaping the field to make an image without the existing controller?
Ok, strike that dumb comment, I just looked up the electrophoretic display, its an electric field not magnetic.
Do you think it would be possible to seperate the existing rear plate into more elements to make a matrix display type thing?
eInk has its place. all shapes and sizes can be very useful. Id be interested in large panels for embedded displays, as well as small panels (1" squares or maybe rectangles) for low powered status indicators.
I would be interested in such a product, assuming it was reasonably inexpensive and a dev kit existed. I would only be interested in eInk displays with a display controller of sorts that was easy to work with.
If it was just the display with a funky connector and barebones documentation, ill pass…although i know some of you may object 8)
I saw some dev kits around $1000ish and up…not quite ready for prime time yet.
While I can see your point, we have to prove there is demand before they hand it to us on a plate!
Without people demanding it and working it out from obscure docs they wont beleive people want it.
I think small 128x128 and 320x240 panels would sell very well. I can see Vista sideshow apps running this kind of display working well! An e-ink sideshow calendar would be cool.
Does anybody know anything about the F3 display or its kind? What voltages are we talking?
is it EL type drivers or LCD levels? Im planning on getting a couple of the phones to play with removing the displays. A small PIC running one of these displays could power a clock from a cr2032 battery for months.
How about tiny 32x32 eink keycaps? A second display on your phone (eink) that showed the last received number+time or SMS so you could read it anytime without taking the phone out of standby or powering the main screen.
There are so many apps.
Depending on how the rear plate for the F3 works, would it be possible to etch a PCB with a matrix layout on it passed through (2 layer) to connections on the back and stick the e-ink display onto it to replace the existing driver?
Glad you guys also want these I’ve been seeing eInk on flash drives too. I imagine those can’t be THAT expensive since they’re selling them pretty cheap
Looks like I was right about the driver IC. There are 2 molded epoxy blobs on the PCB the screen is bonded too.
The screen & kb are both on one VERY thin pcb. So thin it bends 20 degrees or more without damage (when i tried it, no garantee!). The e-ink screen is flexible (dont test this too much!)
The main phone is on a plug in board at the bottom and is a very compact module. I may re-use just this phone part
It should be fairly easy to connect to the 2 e-ink driver ICs, but working out the pinout will take a while as the buttons and leds share the connector. I guess by eliminating all the other connections youll be left with the needed ones
I wouldnt recommend pulling this phone apart unless you have l33t skillz. Its all stuck together and breaks easily. No matter what you do, you will have to keep the screen bonded to the PCB with the keypad. I dont expect removing this would leave you with anything other than a broken screen.
IF its possible to fit the e-ink part onto another PCB i expect you could change the layout of the segments, but no garantee. I will have to totally kill the phone to find that out. It looked so cute before I attacked it.
Pyrofer:
The main phone is on a plug in board at the bottom and is a very compact module. I may re-use just this phone part
OK now I’m interested! I’ve been looking around for info on the phone. Found this http://www.smart-clip.com/f3_pinout.jpg - next question is is it TTL or RS232, and does it use AT-style commands.
If you get one, and dismantle it, DO NOT peel the metal backing from the main large PCB. There is nothing to be gained except destruction of your phone.
The ONLY part you need is to remove the actual phone module at the bottom to get the connector that has the eink/kb interface.
We need the pinout for that connector.
It should be easy to workout the mic/led/speaker/keys connections. The remaining ones are then e-ink connectors.
Can anybody get the driver datasheet?
The connector will certainly be ttl level. probably 3.3v.
a serial/usb converter chip that runs on 3.3v should be easily connected to the phone, wouldnt be hard to find a ground pin. I guess there is power too on that connector. Any idea what the other pads are?
