Hacker News Reader

Comment by phil294 | Hacker News Reader

This seens to be an unpublished, unfinished, unindexed document about a nonexisting product whose project status I am very confused about, yet the concept is absolutely intriguing.

View on HN

Yes, you hit the nail on the head! This was my (private :-) notes-to-self for the project that will be launching as a public project soon. If you want to help, email me (address is in my profile!)!

I have experience with driver circuitry for waveshare e-ink displays and ARM H7 which has USB2 and Wifi. It shouldn't be too difficult to build a small device which is powered by an USB power bank, receives from a USB keyboard and communicates with a USB LTE stick.

So I'm pretty sure that someone has already designed something similar as open hardware that you could fork and customize. I'd start with Googling "kicad eink arm". From memory, the Watchy eink watch with esp32 comes to mind. And I think there are arduino epaper driver boards on Amazon, too.

The earliest generation Kindles had keyboards and various ways to run Linux. I think they tick about every box in this concept, except for the "Great keyboard. Terminal mouse support": the keyboards sucked for typing more than a few minutes. I realise that this is a pretty important "except" if you want to use a terminal, but at least they were actual mass market products.

The concept is beautiful. I would use it as a main machine.

The idea has already been approached, but the realization of a specific machine for that has never been tried.

Do you know the project author?

ex: https://github.com/olup/kobowriter

I'm the author. I didn't find that this hit HN until I woke up this morning and saw it here so missed out on replying to comments until now.

Concept is very cool. The PineNote seems to nail some of it, though I'm not sure about the battery life (definitely not the battery type). If the PineNote could output its desktop when docked it would be a very interesting product I'd happily purchase.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com