Build Log · Prototype
First light
I genuinely wasn't sure this would work. I'd wired a Raspberry Pi to a 7.8-inch sheet of e-ink through its driver board, pushed a rendered front page at it, and more or less braced for a blank screen. Then the ink actually moved, and there it was: a whole page, masthead and columns and everything, sitting on the glass. I stared at it for a while.
It was held together with tape. The panel was stuck to the wall because I had nothing to mount it in, and the driver board dangled off the bottom on its ribbon cable. If you look at the lower half you can see a grey shadow where the last frame hadn't fully cleared. I didn't understand that yet. It turned out to be a refresh-waveform thing I'd only sort out much later. But the type was sharp and the page had come over Wi-Fi from the little renderer I'd written, exactly like it was supposed to. For a first go, I'd take it.
I skipped the test pattern
You're probably meant to start with checkerboards and grey ramps, and I did for about a minute to check the panel wasn't dead. But I wanted to see the real thing. Partly because it's a better test (a test pattern tells you the pixels work; a real page tells you whether the type is actually readable on e-ink, which I had no idea about yet), and partly because watching a newspaper appear is just a lot more fun than watching a grid of squares.
What I took away
Two things stuck. The refresh was slow, several-seconds slow, painting down the screen in bands while I sat and watched. I didn't love it, and it became the next thing I chased. The other was a relief: I'd half expected e-ink to look mushy, and it didn't. At this size the page looked like a page.
That taped-up panel lived on the wall for weeks while I figured out everything around it. It's not pretty, but I'm glad I took the photo. It's easy to forget this is where it started.