Controlling a Broken Kindle Display With an FPGA

Electronic ink, or e-ink, displays are really incredible pieces of technology. Though they require power to refresh a page, unlike nearly every other kind of electronic screen, they don’t require power to be applied to maintain this image. Unfortunately, they do have a few drawbacks, including the relatively slow refresh rate, and, especially from a Maker perspective, the fact that they are much harder to use than their OLED and LCD counterparts.

Much of this difficulty comes from the fact that you can’t simply set a pixel to “black” or “white,” you have to account for what color the pixel currently is and what it needs to be, then apply the appropriate transition signals described in what’s known as a “waveforms table.” These difficulties aside, hacker Julien came up with a method to drive his broken Kindle 3 e-ink display involving a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to help output the proper sequence. Though a difficult project, as seen in the video below, he did eventually get his screen to refresh quite quickly. Be sure to check out his write-up, which includes quite a bit of extra information that he used to accomplish this feat.

Although there are a few Maker-type e-ink displays, like this Raspberry Pi PaPiRus HAT from adafruit, it would be great to see more development in this tech in the future. Personally, I’d love to see an e-ink option used in a smartphone, but, as we’ve seen over and over, manufacturers care more about pure performance than battery life, so I’m not holding my breath!

[h/t Hackaday]