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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

I've wanted a dual eink display for piano sheet music for a while, but it seems that the only ones on the market are $2-5K+. I might try to dink around with a raspberry pi and a few eink displays to see how hard it would be to make a budget one.

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The 2x 13" screen eink tablets for music are about $1500. You can also use a single screen 13" eink tablet and a footpad for turning pages, for about $500-600. They all run Android so Bluetooth foot pedals for page turning work fine.

Smaller 7-10" eink display tablets are even cheaper

Is the majority of that cost the eink displays? $1500 seems super high considering a kindle is $100 (hard to tell if Amazon is subsidizing the cost of the display though)

In my mind, you should be able to buy a dual eink display for <$500

Yeah I think it's low volumes of 13.3" eink screens/tablets that drive the price up. The small ones are really cheap

If you want 13" I don't think Inky will do it. I imagine trying to follow sheet music on a 4.2" display might be a bit rough. But I wouldn't know, I can hardly parse it on proper paper.

I have a gvido device, which you seem to be referencing here. If I could return it, I would have, but their return policy is extremely restrictive and basically amounts to no returns.

It's waaaayyyy to slow to truly function. It can take several seconds for it to process a page turn, and their official fix for it is to change so that it only turns one page at a time.

I make it work when I'm practicing, but I will not use it for a performance, or ensemble work. I recommend staying far away until they can turn out faster devices.

What size do you need? The wHAT is bigger and should work great with this. I don't have one so I haven't been able to verify. Will probably end up getting one at some point.

Currently considering seeing how far I can push the Inky towards a decent refresh rate. It is incredibly slow with color, but a nice device all the same.

Well it would be for sheet music, so ideally it would be in the 6"+ range. The bigger the better. Really just depends on cost - I don't want to spend more than a couple hundred bucks (otherwise I would just buy the PadMu 2)

Could I get more info on the "wHAT"? I tried googling for it, but there are a ton of false positives (due to "wHAT" being the same word as "what").

Should be this, I think - https://thepihut.com/collections/raspberry-pi-screens/produc...

I can see that. Inky what would get you there.

This thing. Not cheap. Slow refresh. But pretty neat. https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/inky-what

That's way too low resolution for displaying sheet music.

Did you mean “to small size” or really “too low resolution”? That screen is around 100dpi, so I find it a bit odd you say it’s too low resolution.

"Resolution" is often used informally to mean "pixel count".

Again, the display is around 100 pixels/inch. Definitely not “retina” (which is such a marketing sham word anyway) level graphics (at the normal distance for sheet music), but still enough for my eyes to read individual notes easily (pixel density wise anyway, 4ish inch screen not withstanding).

Well the pixel density would be usable… if the screen were larger.

It is insufficient to display a page of sheet music.

Hence my “to small size” comment. ;)

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