commented:
I have met Alex and seen a demo of this at FOSDEM this year, and it
looks pretty good.

  commented:
Same, it felt basically "at last".
I wasn't fully sure because it was still a prototype and the case
wasn't done yet but it held a lot of promise. I'm confident that my
next e-ink purchase will most probably be something from modos.

  commented:
I have a dev kit from their earlier Crowd Suppy run, anything y'all
want to know?

  commented:
Good to code on?

  commented:
It's okay; I do take it outside and use it for that.
There are a few different modes of how it renders. The "fast"
(default) mode does B&W, but everything is dithered, which makes
text look bad- there are some dots that shouldn't be switched but are.
Buttons on the side can switch to "text" mode, which is fast and sharp
but just black and white; or my preferred "reading" mode, which does a
fast just-black-and-white paint of the changed regions, then does a
better re-render with grayscale.
So- not as much syntax highlighting ss I usually have, have to retheme
accordingly.

  commented:
any quantitative power draw measurements? Only specs I could find on
it were "high" power compared to "low" of typical epaper.
How's the contrast in bright sunlight?
Have you run into any problems on the software side?

  commented:
No measurments, sorry, I don't have a USB interposer with a power
meter or anything. (Unless you know of a way to read it from a USB
port on Linux? I could give it a whirl!)
I take it outside and use it, in preference to my builtin screen. I'm
trying to avoid direct light (I burn) but it's absolutely usable.
The one "gotcha" for me was setting the right mdoe; there are a few
buttons that can switch between different speed/dithering/grayscale
tradeoffs, which I didn't know until poking at it. I haven't tried
re-flashing it.
There is a host-side SDK with the idea that you can plug it in to your
window manager or what bot and tell it to use different modes for
different regions. I tried that and didn't get it immediately working,
but haven't spent a lot of time debugging; could be a problem that I
personally have.

  commented:
this is a really cool display! would be great to see it in a laptop or
a tablet, I’m not sure I have a usecase for a small external display
on its own.

On the go, you can power Flow at up to 40 Hz with a single USB Type-C
cable. At a desk, you can connect additional power and take advantage
of its full 60 Hz refresh rate.

this sounds a bit weird to me. I can’t find the numbers for power
consumption, but one USB C cable can power an entire high-end laptop,
surely a single display can’t consume more?

  commented:
If I understand correctly (I don't), it's a matter of whether the
input has Power Delivery. A desktop monitor with an AC/DC input will
output PD at 60W or 100W or whatever. By my laptop won't output PD.
I have a camera that will only charge via PD; my laptop will happily
connect to it by USB-C, but won't charge it, because it needs 25W or
30W or something.
That said, yeah, I have other portable monitors in my house that can
run off USB-C from a laptop. E-ink needs higher voltages than 5V to
clear cells, maybe that boosts the power draw too high at 60Hz?

  commented:
I'm kind of incredulous about this. From what I understand, the slow
frame rate is basically a software limitation, not a hardware one? Why
hasn't this become more widely available?

  commented:
Cost and reliability. The main usecase of eink displays is low power.
Having a power hungry high bandwidth controller goes against the main
usecase, so less effort is powered into it, having a more expensive
controller that your customers don't need isn't worth it then. Driving
eink displays harder drives their longevity down, which shifts their
value proposition. Eink displays tend to be expensive to begin with,
through a combination of patent cost and tricky mechanical design. You
could manage to get a Toyota Corolla to go at 150 mph, but you'd have
to modify things in the interior meant for comfort as well as remove
some safety mechanisms and everything that moves in the car might be
done after a single lap of that.

  commented:
I see, thanks for the explanation.
Do you have a sense for the longevity of the display driving it like
this?

  commented:
No, this isn't just basically software.  He had to design a
special-case hardware controller to deal with the physical constraints
of the pixels, at carefully tuned update rates.
Ultimately, "all hardware is just an algorithm, thus starts with
software" is true - but in the case of e-Ink, the controller market
has not caught up to the same extent that, say, a DVI or VGA
controller market, which has decades to develop.
Since Alex' work is open source, I would expect that this is going to
get reproduced at scale, at some point soon ..

  commented:
That's fair. The hardware controller needs to change. But my point is
that the e-ink display itself is capable of doing this type of
refresh. It was purely an interface issue.

  commented:
Clearly there's some desire for a high refresh rate, high contrast
reflective screen. I wonder why most of the approaches we're seeing
are "lets make do with normal epaper or hack it" (like this) rather
than manufacturers (perhaps Sharp's Memory Display line?) making 6in
or larger reflective LCD panels?
edit: also please electronics industry make a purchasable
electrowetting display....

  commented:
My impression is that e-ink looks more like paper than reflective LCDs
do.

  commented:
yup, though not enough to disqualify reflective LCDs for direct
sunlight use (at least for me, based on my Playdate handheld). e-ink
is definitely better on that front than LCDs, so if this took off and
was robust over long term, that would be extremely cool.

  commented:
I've been considering making a hand held console in the same vein as
the playdate (which uses the sharp memory display) but with one of
these st730* displays . I'm still investigating and testing with them,
but I think there are people pushing in this direction given how cheap
these are.
.