Build Log · Industrial design
The shells are here
Newsboard is a 7.8-inch e-ink display that shows the day’s news as a front page. I’m building it on my own, in Singapore.
In May I wrote that the aluminium case was a promise, not a product. The working unit back then was a black 3D-printed prototype, the driver board lived in packing foam, and I asked you to take the machined shell on faith. That post ended with a commitment: when the milled shells come off the mill, they show up here first, in the Build Log. I have to own something straight away: they didn't. The new website got the photographs a day before I finished writing this. The Build Log got the truth eventually, which will have to do.
Off the mill, out of the bath
The shells came back CNC-cut from solid 6061, Type II anodised, in natural silver. The first thing you notice is the weight, and the second is the temperature: the metal sits cool in the hand in a way plastic never does. The seams line up. Nothing creaks. The wedge stand isn't a separate part bolted on; it's cut from the same block, so the panel and the thing holding it up are one object.
[Correction, added October 2026: I got the stand wrong here. The silver block under the screen is an aluminium cover over the electronics, and everything is built on a polycarbonate base. That’s on purpose: aluminium would box in the Wi-Fi antenna, and polycarbonate lets the signal through. I’ve left the sentence above as I wrote it in July.]
The back got the same finish as the front. That sounds like a small thing, but most gadgets have a face they show you and a side they hope you'll ignore, and I didn't want to build one of those.
Assembled and running
The electronics moved out of the foam and into the metal, and the unit in these photographs is the one running on my desk right now, still drawing a new front page on schedule. Every photograph on the site is this unit. If you read the May post and wondered whether the aluminium would ever be more than a nice sentence: that post now has its answer, and so do I.
[Correction, added October 2026: this said “about every ten minutes”. The panel checks for a new page every ten minutes, but it draws a new one every hour by default.]
[Wording tidied in October 2026. Any corrections are marked.]