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by 3eb7988a1663 19 days ago
That looks really cool, but that price point. I could get a Steam Deck + travel keyboard and still come out ahead.

Is that the true price for a low volume, niche product? Eink monopoly continues to make the world worse?

Looked it up, and the original One Laptop per Child came in around $200
1 comments
1shooner 19 days ago
I was gifted a Traveler several years ago. It is overpriced and bound to the vendor data service for any connected functionality. You can read and write off of it via USB, but it doesn't actually use a true filesystem for your text files, it writes them into the main app's sqlite DB, which in the past has had data loss issues.

My version uses ancient releases of Node and React for the UI for some horrible reason, and it is painfully slow.

I've rooted mine and have it as a project to look at the new OS and decide what to do with it, but if I had the cash I'd look elsewhere.

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caconym_ 18 days ago
> bound to the vendor data service for any connected functionality.

This is why I don't own a Freewrite. It should be such a simple device, but they found a way to make it complicated and lock it into their proprietary ecosystem. No thanks.

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chunkyks 18 days ago
It would be a better device if I could install cfw and make it somewhat more versatile. But I haven't found anyone doing that, and haven't even found enough specs online to get started.
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1shooner 18 days ago
I ought to do a write up, but If you open it up the UART pads are available to get a U-Boot console. U-boot is in HAB mode, with a custom signed debian buster kernel. This was my first time dealing wit u-boot, but it was otherwise pretty open and was able to write to ENV and FS from the u-boot console, which let me stop the Freewrite app from starting, boot into root shell, turn on SSH, etc. So you can get into userspace and replace the UI and whole app. When I dropped this project I had it booting shell onto the e-ink, with a command to drop back into the Freewrite app if I wanted.

Then they released the new app, which looked like it was also just in userspace (not a kernel or fw update) so I wanted to start over with the update, but never got back to it.

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