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Waveforms binary extract

A project log for FPGA eink controller

ice40 FPGA based custom board to control eink display

julienJulien 04/21/2017 at 06:110 Comments

In the Kindle 3 screen, the waveform is actually integrated into an SPI flash in the ribbon cable. In others e-reader, this can generaly be found in the firmware. E-Ink (PVI) created his own format, supported by custom controller, and some dedicated Epson chip. I think these controllers are obsoleted since CPU manufacturers does integrate the controller directly. Actually the main (only?) manufacturer which provide CPU supporting eink screen is Freescale (imx6 solo) and they created their format as well.

I did not integrate the SPI signal out of the ribbon, but somebody already dumped the data, so I used that for working on an "extractor" to convert this data for the FPGA. As the whole technology, there is very few information about this PVI format. You can find some information in linux kernel (about the header of the binary), the rest is mostly guess : I'm not completely sure of the dumper yet, but the data extrated does give some correct results.

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