FPGA and e-ink at 75Hz? It sounds like it will have a high power draw.

alex-a-soto 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Our driver board, under continuous use, draws about 1 to 1.5W. A recent article below goes into some detail about our design choices.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/modos-tech/modos-paper-monitor/u...

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dotancohen 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I use E-ink for the reduced eye strain, the battery draw really does not bother me. I like having devices that last weeks on a single charge, but I would gladly charge them more often for an increased refresh rate.

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dankwizard 5 days ago | parent [-]

If your phone screen became a 75hz e-ink display I'm pretty sure that would actually drain your battery faster than currently, which I assume is once per day. Would you accept that compromise of going from weeks to <1 day?

Curious.

	▲	8organicbits 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Just an anecdote, but my phone ran out of battery most often when a full charge lasted almost two days. It made me lazy about charging at night. Now I have a wireless charger next to my work computer and in my car, I probably don't need to charge at night any more. Granted, I'd prefer a large battery when I'm traveling, but battery size is less important to me recently.
	▲	dotancohen 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I'm curious too. But I would definitely take the risk and purchase such a device, so long as it comes with an EMR stylus.

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amarant 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Compared to other e-ink devices, yes.

Compared to LCD, oled or what have you, my understanding is that it uses significantly less.

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dragontamer 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

LCDs can have superior power draw than EInk.

See the microwatts of power that Sharps MemoryLCD displays have. They often beat comparable EInk screens in power draw.

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aydyn 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Is that because it doesnt have a backlight?

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amarant 6 days ago | parent [-]

I think a large part of it is because modos is really good at partial screen updates. This is also, in my understanding, how they achieve the high FPS rate.

The parts of the screen that doesn't update, courtesy of being e-ink, don't use any power at all. LCD will use power if you're looking at a static image, eink won't. And a lot of the time, 95% of the screen is a static image and only 5 percent actually updates. One of Modos' biggest innovations is successfully taking advantage of that.

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ranger_danger 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

So it's not actually 75hz all the time then? Depending on what's on the screen?

That's unfortunate.

I'm imagining a fast scrolling game with complex backgrounds where most of the pixels are changing values every frame, I assume it completely breaks down in that case.

	▲	amarant 6 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's 75hz when it needs to be, but if 2 frames are mostly identical, it doesn't needlessly move ink around. Effect: 75hz always as far as the user is concerned, but sometimes it uses less power than that when possible, due to very clever optimisations at the firmware level. Or that's how I understand it anyway. I saw that Alex Soto himself is in this comment thread, he'll know a lot more than me, I'm just spreading what little knowledge I've gathered from his blog posts and some of the discussions in the modos mastodon server. I've probably misunderstood a lot of that too, I'm not a hardware engineer, just a lowly java dev with a strong but hobby level interest in eink. Modos is my dream laptop, but it's currently unclear when that'll become reality. Again, Alex Soto will know more.
	▲	carlosjobim 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		For a fast scrolling game it makes more sense to use a display which is made for that.

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lo0dot0 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The display can only show a video well that has this property of only updating parts of the screen but not everything at the same time? What if the video content is like so?