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I found a nearly 6" 7-color e-paper display, and my first thought is woo!
Then I realize, I can't actually use it with anything because 640x448x4bits is too large for nearly any IoT device to hold in memory at a time, and they way these things are designed, you have to hold the frame buffer in memory, or you can only write full screens directly off of flash which isn't practical.
So who designed this screen? Did they not think of memory requirements?
They claim it's compatible with a Raspberry Pi, and yeah, it would be because I can get one with 1GB of memory or more.
But who in the world is going to make a color e-reader with an $80 screen powered by a largish, power hungry $150 computer that usually requires fans and dedicated power?
I'm trying to figure out a real world use case for this screen, and the only thing that can realistically run it other than a raspberry pi is maybe an ESP32 WROVER, which isn't the most popular device for commercial products for reasons.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I don't think all this IoT is good for you. Sounds very time-consuming and expensive. 
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There are four possibilities as I see it:
(1) The screen manufacturer has a product and can manufacture it fairly cheaply as a loss leader to encourage computer hardware manufacturers. Build it and they will come, so to speak.
(2) The screen manufacturer has made a mistake. They thought IoT devices or embedded devices were coming soon and they are not.
(3) Or perhaps they are were correct and a new generation of devices are just about to be launched that can take advantage of their screen. It doesn't really need to be IoT; it could be embedded or self-build (although I regret to admit that the latter probably rarely constitutes a decent market size).
(4) The manufacturer is willing to release this on the basis that it shows what they can do in the expectation that they'll never sell much more than engineering samples but it will generate sales for follow-on products.
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You could very well be right. I will say that a 7 color e-paper display is neat technology, but I wish they made it in smaller versions, like 200x200 as well, so that they could be opened up to a lot more devices.
Real programmers use butterflies
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honey the codewitch wrote: But who in the world is going to make a color e-reader with an $80 screen powered by a largish, power hungry $150 computer that usually requires fans and dedicated power?
Not exactly sure about the specs of your original question, but googling I found a CNC Lathe that has "Standard Program Memory, 1 GB". Which I suppose means you can add more memory than that.
Would that answer your question - at least hypothetically?
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Never used an e-reader. Do they switch pages very fast?
This looks like an el-cheapo bunch of memory: (running at 133 mhz)
2pcs ESP-PSRAM64H Chip - 64 Mbit Serial Pseudo SRAM - ElectroDragon
Don't see any reason you couldn't compute (say) 10 scanlines in actual ram, before blasting em to the device, ready to be dumped to screen after you'd rendered the whole page. I did phong-shaded surface renderings of 4d julia fractals at 640x480 back in dos using only 64 k of memory using a similar trick for the zbuffer...
Of course, I've no idea how mem hungry the TTF stuff is, nor how many scanlines each line of text is high.
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e-paper doesn't refresh very well, and you can't (usually) update just part of the screen at once - it's all or nothing.
Anyway, I figured it out, for an ESP32 at least. Not probably for something like an ARM Cortex-M
Real programmers use butterflies
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No, no, no - I mean send a few scanlines to the pseudo-ram before dumping a whole screen (I said page) to the display. 10 scanlines * 640 * 4 bits would only be (6400/2) bytes worth of uController ram. The STM32F103C8T6 has 20kb and runs at 72mhz. Last year they were $3.something US - now about a tenner.  Heh heh - good thing I bought 5!
Kinda neat (but probably pointless here) that the the esp32 lets you memory-map the pseudo-ram and access it like it's on-chip ram.
I'd imagine a RaspberyPi Zero would make a potentially half decent brain for an e-reader - they're only 10 Australian pesos for 512MB and 1Ghz. 17 or so if you want the one with onboard wifi and blutooth.
You're one smart bunny. Love reading about your exploits
modified 17-Jul-21 1:48am.
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For $10 I'll just get an ESP32 WROOM devkit. You can get the chip itself for like $2 but that's without all the supporting hardware to make it go + program it. They're dual core 240MhZ with like 300kB of RAM available and 4MB of flash. WROVERs with the extra PSRAM aren't that much more, but are a little bit harder to come by reliably.
The problem with a raspberry pi is they are power hungry as heck. It's a bit hamfisted for an e-reader. You may as well just run some EPUB reader software on a linux desktop over HDMI with it. The power saving from e-ink won't matter. I mean, if you really want to save on eye-strain get a nook because doing this with a raspberry pi is like going fishing with a battleship.
And thank you! I appreciate it when people let me know they enjoy my work. I'm getting an E-PUB reader working on a WROOM. Right now I'm neck deep in making a zip library that allows you to stream the contents directly out of the zip file without loading them into RAM or storing them in flash uncompressed (but you can if you want/need to). EPUBs are just zips renamed, so I'm treating the entire zip archive as its own little read-only filesystem with all the EPUB html and image content.  No RAM use - except for a small amount of temporary block buffer for the decompressing stream. My end goal is to get it running on a WROOM, and running quickly on a WROVER.
Real programmers use butterflies
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 Oh wow, your analogy is killing me with laughter. "fishing with a battleship" he he he.
"It is a cheap battleship" he feebly replies.. 
Letting you know the tales of your adventures are fun reading are the least I could do.. You go gettem! Sounds like you're a long way through the task of beating those epubs into submission. Love it. 
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If you use it for a color e reader do you need to worry that much about power?
It seems like a few physical switches would let the device be powered off most of the time.
Click a switch to advance to the next page, power on, page renders, power off. (Screen still displays)
Slow human reader will take seconds to read the page.
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Powering an RPi off and on like that creates an issue, in that it runs an actual OS. Turning back on isn't instant. Sure it might be able to be done, but whatever can be saved in power on an RPi it still pales in comparison to the savings of using an ESP32 instead.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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DIV.JS[^]
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
The metaphorical solid rear-end expulsions have impacted the metaphorical motorized bladed rotating air movement mechanism.
Do questions with multiple question marks annoy you???
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Not clicking on it, what is it?
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HTML, but only using DIVs.
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
The metaphorical solid rear-end expulsions have impacted the metaphorical motorized bladed rotating air movement mechanism.
Do questions with multiple question marks annoy you???
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I'm surprised that hasn't become the new rage.
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but still ... it's a funny joke
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Arbitrary-palette positional dithering algorithm[^]
I've been working on supporting color e-paper devices in IoT gadgets where the e-paper ranges from 2 to 7 colors that I've seen.
In order to allow you to load JPEG images onto these displays reasonably, some amount of dithering is extremely helpful, but I never thought it could be so involved.
Even if I never used it, this is an interesting read.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I used to own that book.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Ha!
I might have ripped the pages out quicker, had I known the code'd have been accessibly posted in the future. But as it was I must have scattered more than a few pages, crumpled up in individual wads then thrown into the bottom of a shipping box to serve as padding for those heavier X-mas gifts sent east ... through the years.
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Very interesting!
I certainly learnt a few things about dithering that I didn't know before...
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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I use a variant of one his algorithms in my code, but it's not fast enough for me for the devices I want to target. Then again, 640x448x3bits is taxing for any IoT device, even without dithering and color matching. I'm not even sure if that screen is practical at all though and I won't know until it arrives. It could be that the Pi is the only thing I have that will run it.
Real programmers use butterflies
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It works fantastic for HTML to markdown, even allowing you to specify which Markdown dialect to use.
CloudConvert[^]
I use it for maintaining my GFX lib documentation - i load my codeproject content into it and produce readmes for Github. It's a snap.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Probably belongs here: Free Tools Discussion Boards[^] - this forum is mostly for  moments!
[edit]
You probably need to be careful with posts like this as well - it's a paid-for service with a free trial (25 per day), so some will consider it spam rather than a tool post.
[/edit]
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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