So this would be really challenging, but I’d wonder if anyone would be interested in it. There’s an open source project called epdiy that lets you drive used e-reader screens like this 13 incher. It’d be pretty great if there was some way to get the Framework display cable to talk to the adapter in question. It would be uglier but likely more practical to use a smaller display and have part of the lid be the PCB needed to interface with the thing. Would anyone be interested in such a screen?
3 Likes
Have you ever used an e-ink display? The experience would be absolutely terrible for a laptop. It makes sense for an e-reader, maybe a low power drawing tablet, but that’s it. The “latency” is at minimum half a second, and the refresh rate is probably 1Hz at best. I don’t think it’s worth the effort to most likely use an FPGA or something to try to translate displayport to SPI or whatever that driver board uses.
3 Likes
The ThinkBook Plus Gen 2 has an eink display
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkbook/thinkbook-series/thinkbook-plus-g2-itg/xxtbxpli300
Which might be an interesting concept rather than replacing the primary screen.
There are a few phones that have eink back screens. Neat but I don’t know how useful those are.
I love e-readers and plan on getting the PineNote
1 Like
Absolutely. As someone that just wants to write on a long lasting laptop that can support windows apps, an e-ink screen option would make this perfect.
1 Like
I could see myself using an e-ink screen for reading, and maybe text editing if the refresh rate was high enough for that specific use case. That said, current generation e-ink isn’t ideal for that many types of content. What I’d love to see is an OLED panel in front of an e-ink display, such that you could switch between them, and maybe use the e-ink display for extra contrast.
2 Likes
To add to the discussion, I think e-ink display would be great for editing documents outside under the sun. I’m pretty sure anyone with the experience of doing anything outside with an LCD display would agree that it is painful experience.
I’ve never used an OLED display before, but fundamentally, it is still trying to display something by emitting light, albeit a little bit more efficiently than LCD. Also, anything that tries to match the solar brightness would be a power hog. So I definitely see a niche where e-ink would be the perfect choice.
Edit:
I found this community built e-ink laptop discussion on the ei2030 forum
It seems that this is a Framework Laptop with replaced eink screen hacked by a user. https://twitter.com/zephray_wenting/status/1535041457035280392 , https://twitter.com/FrameworkPuter/status/1535050729563430912
I wish that someone will ask this person to have the GitHub repo or blog page. As I don’t have my Twitter account, I cannot ask. Then I can update the Framework Wikipedia page with the pages in the better way.
Edited: As I found the person’s email, I emailed. 
3 Likes
Nice! Now, I’m a little skeptical that this was a full install. There doesn’t seem to be any bezel, webcam etc, and I suspect at least one of the two ports in use looks like it’s likely to be connected to a breakout board on the table behind the screen, with the eink screen just leaning up against the regular screen. But it’s still an impressive step!