robertlangdon

You're right, we made a mistake. I checked with my partner. Thanks for pointing out, it would be at least 1-1.5 months for 2000mAh. Talk about short selling yourself!

E-papers have a slow refresh rate, it takes about 5 seconds to display a completely new image. And considering it takes about 15 seconds to connect and download an image (based on network speed), we get current spikes upto 300-400mA during WiFi transfer. We can expect conservatively a 1-1.5 months life from a 2000mAh battery.

The mAh unit enables us to compare batteries easier I believe. Standard LiPo are 3.7V so given a mAh rating its easier to know which will last longer. While for a Wh unit you would have to calculate it.

haha no worries!

Oh, thanks. Will update.

Sorry this is the best pricing we have right now. And no plans yet for the 6" version, depends on how we do on this one. E-paper is quite hard to source and is expensive.

Thanks and appreciate the feedback

Unfortunately none of the major crowdfunding platforms support our country to collect funds. It's sad that you have a product but would not be able to launch it because of these issues. We somehow managed to go on IGG so that's the best bet we have right now.

Would be 3-4 days on 2000mAH battery

Thanks! That's correct, e-paper displays and the silicon chip prices are high right now (the last we checked before our campaign launch in April) plus the inflation and uncertainty around shipping. The answer to your question is difficult to give right now, it depends on how many orders we get and what price we're able to negotiate. We put all our savings into the prototype and have been bootstrapped, thus the crowdfunding. Hopefully we'll be in a strong position with enough orders to get good prices after the campaign. Hope that helps!

paperd.ink is a 4.2" e-paper display coupled with an ESP32 microcontroller. It's open-source, fully hackable and all the PCB and 3D printing files are available on our Github repo. It’s low power so you can run it for a month on a single charge. Update wirelessly using WiFi, Bluetooth. Display your calendar, to-do list, weather, custom images, whatever you want. Code using micropython, Arduino, or ESP-IDF.

It was too hard to launch a hardware product on a shoestring budget dealing with way too many issues amidst the pandemic. But thanks to the HN community, we got a great response last year on our prototype which gave us confidence to move forward!

You're right, it's on our list for updates

Colored ones are quite expensive so we started with monochrome

>speaking in an inside voice as opposed to shouting at them

Now that's a way to put it! We were also perplexed while doing research initially as to why aren't these displays used more widely. One of the issues was cost and limited suppliers. So thought this might be a good thing to work on

we're tinkering around designs, will check without LED too

Have posted on couple of others, will check these out

UPDATE 2:

We're live again.

Could not resolve issue with the current hosting service provider yet so made a temporary website and routing everything there, which took its time own again to connect to the domain.

Hopefully this isn't too late. It was really frustrating but many lessons learnt. Thanks everyone for all the reviews and feedback!

You're right, price is a big issue. We want to be able to provide affordable and useful e-paper displays and are actively working towards the vision.

Can you write to me on prasad[at]paperd[dot]ink? Or let me know what's the best way to connect

Thanks. The code is the example code for our product. but it does not have any other example code. It uses open source libraries and icons.

https://hackaday.io/project/168668-paperdink

That was surely insightful. We'll test with a white LED.

And we're working on the binaries and GUI, it seems like current hardware won't be able to serve web pages.

Have updated the specs. Thanks for pointing out, typos seem to be a careless mistake.

UPDATE:

Unfortunately our website crashed and we're fixing it.

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srrAUOsWHMs&t=3s

User Research Typeform: https://prasad463729.typeform.com/to/cmp81P

Hackaday: https://hackaday.io/project/168668-paperdink

Github: https://github.com/rgujju/paperdink

Specs: Monochrome, 4.2", 400x300 resolution

We're looking at a selling price of $59 currently however there's a lot of scope to improve further. Looking at crowdfunding and other options for funding.

Lastly, this is the first time we've posted on HN so please bear with me if there were any novice mistakes (like spamming link/lines in every comment, which has been rectified now).

Thanks for all the support and feedback coming in!

Oh I am so sorry, my bad. I'll be careful.

Edit: After user tobr's useful advice, I've edited and removed links from most comments, hope that's fine. Our website will be up asap.

Thanks for the help. We're working on fixing the issue.

We're looking at a selling price of around $59 currently. We're checking for financing options in addition to crowdfunding.

Hey,

Thanks for the info, will definitely check it out. You can fill in our form if you'd like.

Take care!

Hi,

Paperd.Ink has a refresh rate of 4s for full refresh and <1s for partial. We're working on lowering it further.

Hey,

Yes it 3D printed, we wanted to test the prototype. If you have any suggestions do let us know.

Thanks!

Thanks for the feedback, its 3D printed and we're actively looking out for better options.

Thanks for the feedback, we're working on making the MVP better. The website is down unfortunately (trying to work on it asap)