Become an e-ink stained wretch: Build a simple typewriter with a maker-friendly display - [Resources]
Lucian Copeland · IEEE Spectrum · 2019
My entire professional life as an engineer is spent on, or adjacent to, a glowing laptop. I use the same computer to code, research, design, and document, and even to waste time. Hour upon hour, every day of the week, every week. So I push to have my creative time be analog: Coming home to do some creative writing, only to sit down at the exact same computer, feels more exhausting than restful-oh joy, more screen time. But while I find words as easy to read on paper as on a screen, writing does not translate to the analog world so well. After years of typing on a keyboard, writing in a notebook is slow and hand-crampingly painful. With the relatively recent availability of maker-friendly electronic-paper displays of the sort used by devices like the Amazon Kindle, I fantasized about a device that would bring together the best of both worlds, combining a keyboard with the static, daylight-readable surface of an electronic-paper screen. A device that would make me feel the same about writing as I did about picking up a book, with no eyestrain, notifications, or YouTube distractions. And I could do better than the old dedicated word processors of the 1990s-I'd blast past them with 10 gigabytes of SD card storage, triple the display size, and crisper contrast and custom formatting. However, I quickly found that there were some serious issues I'd have to resolve before banging out a prototype. The first, and most glaring, was the dismal refresh rate of the e-paper screens I was buying- upwards of 2 seconds, if you used the original firmware. If you tried to go faster with custom firmware, you'd get persistent screen burn. It turned out that this was the major reason I hadn't seen my fantasy word processor already on the market-the few similar commercial attempts had received harsh user reviews regarding the lag between pressing a key and seeing a result.