Un Kyu Lee's Latest Distraction-Free Micro Journal Is a Typewriter-Inspired ePaper Beast
After a year of experimentation and iteration, the latest Micro Journal delivers a slick distraction-free writing experience — and a lamp.
Maker Un Kyu Lee has unveiled the latest in the Micro Journal line-up of distraction-free writing gadgets, this time a take on a modernized portable electronic typewriter — complete with angle-adjustable reading light to make the ePaper screen more usable indoors and at night.
"This is the seventh revision of the Micro Journal. When you scroll through the home screen, where all the past revisions are lined up, you can really see how much it has evolved over time. Hard to believe it's been a whole year since this project started," Lee writes of the latest model. "For this version, I dialed back the creativity a bit and focused on making something solid and grounded—no surprises, just a design that feels instantly familiar and easy to use."
As the maker says, Lee has been working on the Micro Journal family for around a year — producing design after design all centered around the core concept of a device which offers a distraction-free environment for writing, deliberately locked away from the ability to switch out to other applications. Some have been built around Raspberry Pi single-board computers; some upcycled smartphones; others Espressif ESP32 microcontrollers. All have in common a mechanical keyboard and a color LCD display.
That is, until the Micro Journal Rev. 7, brought to our attention by Liliputing. This model is Lee's first to use an ePaper display, based on electrophoretic technology and drawing power only when it changes states. It's the closest thing to paper you'll get and still be able to update what's on there, though with the drawbacks that it takes a relatively long time to refresh and color models are slow, often pale, and expensive.
"I wasn't fully convinced at first. [ePaper] is a fascinating technology," Lee says, "and people talk about it a lot, but it comes with trade-offs — delayed response, ghosting, and a painfully slow refresh rate. The display I used, the T5 e-Paper from LILYGO, supports partial refresh. So, I modified the code to update only the sections that changed instead of refreshing the whole screen. This improved things a lot. Despite all the technical drawbacks, the sensation of writing on [ePaper] won me over."
The display folds down into a slick 3D-printed typewriter-inspired body that houses a mechanical keyboard with a staggered layout — another shift from the grid-like ortholinear layout of most previous designs. The final touch: an angle-adjustable lamp, making up for the ePaper display's lack of front- or backlight — meaning the device can be used even in the dark, with the lamp illuminating both the display and the keyboard.
Design files and firmware for the Micro Journal Rev. 7 are available in the Micro Journal GitHub repository, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.