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Kicking around a Hackaday Prize Best Product Entry: "PaperBack"

A project log for PaperBack: A Desktop EPaper Monitor

EPaper monitor driven by either VGA or an Internet Connected ESP32.

pkPK 04/30/2017 at 16:050 Comments

As soon as I saw that the 'Best Product' category was coming back to the Hackaday Prize, I got to thinking about what product I'd like to see on the market. I kicked around a few, but after polling my wife and some coworkers, it seems that there would be some demand for a desktop E-Paper display.

And yes, that's a product *I'd* love to have. From my perspective, I'd love to have a secondary monitor where I can park slow moving graphics or static text and images. Something small and readable would be perfect for API References and Datasheets - the sorts of things I'm staring at late at night, haha.

The Market Potential and Prior Art

I did some searching on what's out there in the marketplace.

The current gold standard for a secondary e-ink display is the Paperlike, a 13.3" E-Ink display. It is fully spec'd out with tons of features and display modes, a beautiful stand, and a reasonably sized team backing it. The current tradeoff is the pricetag: only a pre-order on a second batch is open right now, but I believe the cost is somewhere north of $1,000 (please correct me if that's wrong!).

Optionally, you could also get a developer kit and build out the driver yourself. One nice large-format example is Visionect's developer kits for 32" and 42" displays. That's a size where you could theoretically replace your primary monitor - but again, you're looking at a few thousand dollars.

As for competing technology, the cheapest somewhat comparable class of displays is reflective displays. Think your Game Boy Color or perhaps more recently the Pebble Smartwatch: color displays that perform well in direct sunlight.

Market Demand

While you don't necessarily need to validate your exact product versus the market (Henry Ford's possibly apocryphal "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."), it's nice if you see some demand.

Well, you don't even need to leave Hacker News to see the demand. [1] [2] [3].

Also, again, I could use one. That's a factor I overweight, haha.

Would It Make a Good Product?

I think PaperBack would be a good entry.

My target specifications are modest:

... perhaps even 9.7" is a bit small for a primary display (noticed that the smallest laptops you can generally buy are 10.1"?) but as a secondary display those sizes work well for some definitions of well.

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