[robinsoh]

> They are either impossibly incompetent or there is something about the technology that makes mass availability in different form factors not viable and our laymen understanding doesn't see it.

You are correct, it is the equivalent of me as a display engineer coming here and saying "Cray computers has an active incentive to keep it out of consumer's hands" or alleging "Microsoft is blocking progress in the operating system industry using their patent". If you examine my comment history, you'll see I've tried repeatedly before on HN to explain why the physics of electrophoresis is the dominant limitation in the industry but that is apparently harder to understand and harder to accept, whereas people saying things like "the company behind the tech has an active incentive to keep it out of consumers' hands." or "the technology is locked by a company that doesn't innovate nor mass produce their tech. " without citations or any evidence is accepted as the gospel truth. :-)

[haroldp]

Why does my 12 year old kindle-keyboard refresh so much faster and better than any eink hobby display that I can buy? Do you think there is any hope of this changing?

[captainmuon]

The panels are very similar. Amazon made their own driver board, and they put a lot of work into tuning it. The ones you can buy for hobbyists have very cheap driver boards that are merely "good enough".

Why they can't be a dollar or two more expensive and have better components, or why they can't just release the firmware source so people can improve it, I have no idea. I would almost say they are intentionally limiting it, but I've seen the same behavior from single-board-computer vendors, for example. It's really short sighted.

[robinsoh]

> why they can't just release the firmware source so people can improve it

Isn't kindle firmware published open source? What is in this stuff that they provide? https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

[captainmuon]

The operating system (based on Linux) is open source. For some reason, people call the OS image firmware when it is on an "embedded" device. I rather mean the firmware of the e-ink driver board, which is a trade secret. I don't know, maybe it is not even firmware in an MCU, but they have a dedicated driver chip and it just has the look-up-tables. Anyway, the secret sauce that tells you how to drive the display cells.

[robinsoh]

> I rather mean the firmware of the e-ink driver board, which is a trade secret. I don't know, maybe it is not even firmware in an MCU, but they have a dedicated driver chip and it just has the look-up-tables. Anyway, the secret sauce that tells you how to drive the display cells.

Huh? What e-ink driver board? There's no such thing inside a Kindle. It is a straight NXP SoC that drives the e-ink panel directly. There is no MCU. The driver is open source. https://github.com/canselcik/libremarkable/blob/master/refer...

"Secret sauce that tells you how to drive the display cells"? You mean like a voltage table that is also present inside every LCD or OLED? The difference would be that the electrophoretic display would need a much bigger table so it would have to be kept on the SoC since it can't possibly fit into a single voltage driver circuit. That's not software, that's just a big table of voltages that's hardcoded for each unique panel. Is that what you think is "secret sauce"? Do you also want to extract that table inside each LCD drive circuit as well? I guess you could use it to make your LCD or OLED panel show brighter colors but at the risk of burning and damaging the crystals. I imagine the same risk would also be true for electrophoretic panels or anything where you can change the physical voltage that is being applied to the material.

[marcjuul]

It's actually simpler than a table of voltages. It's a series of trinary values that indicate whether to use positive, negative or zero voltage. The actual voltage used is static (even the specialized EPDC PMIC (which _is_ a separate chip) doesn't allow changing it on the devices I've seen). The waveform (as they call the lookup table) is sometimes actually stored on a separate flash chip soldered on to the display's built-in cable. Years ago I wrote a tool to decode and convert the proprietary formats used by the E Ink corporation for these: https://github.com/fread-ink/inkwave

[robinsoh]

> Why does my 12 year old kindle-keyboard refresh so much faster and better than any eink hobby display that I can buy? Do you think there is any hope of this changing?

I have no idea what you mean by "refresh so much faster and better" or what an "eink hobby display" is. To me, you can buy the same panel Kindle uses on the market and you can drive it with various different controllers and the "update latency" (electrophoretic panels don't refresh) will be different.