Hacker News Reader

Comment by achn | Hacker News Reader

Can the remarkable tablet (or 2nd gen) be used as a epaper monitor? I would love to be able to code on an epaper screen, even if only in a simple text editor with minimal visual change/animation.

View on HN

I would pay a silly sum of money for an eInk laptop so I can code outside in the sun. We get so little sun here in the UK that my side project productivity plummets in good weather because I was to sit out and enjoy it. It doesn’t need to have a high refresh rate, it just has to be able to display text and browser the internet in some semblance of reasonable.

What do you think is the lowest acceptable refresh rate to make typing feel smooth? If you're a 60wpm typer, that'd be 60hz to display every character as you type it, might feel disjointed otherwise.

This screen is a different kind than you are used to. The pixels actually wear out after a remarkably small number of changes (~10k). So "60Hz" doesn't mean much. It can update the small number of pixels you actually want changed pretty quickly, but it takes a noticeable fraction of a second. The key is changing only those and leaving all the rest the hell alone.

Running Gnome on it is possible. But you do not want to.

I guess the letter rate is more important with this than the word rate, I would say 0.5 seconds would be the low end of reasonable (so 2 hz), if it could get to maybe 5-10hz that would be super

60 wpm == 1 hz

1 hz per word - but people type a character at a time. A word per second isn't great.

There are some laptops still with the transflective display technology that the OLPC used. Fewer than I'd like, since I have the exact same situation as you.

You can buy dasung eink monitor. The only downside is that it is only 13 inch. http://www.dasungtech.com/

This looks amazing, thanks. My question still stands, though, as it would be incredible to have a good notepad and monitor solution in one.

The other downside is that it's $1000-ish for 13 inches. Also, what's the refresh rate? If it's too slow, it'd be pretty aggravating.

People have written programs for the rM for doing this, yes. It's not a first-party use case though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com