Caffeine
carbonatedcaffeine@fosstodon.org
https://files.hrdl.eu/pn_2025-03-20_sway_hints.mp4
Reposting this video here from community member Hrdl.
This video demos the improved display controller driver which means goodbye artifacting and welcome to automatic redrawing on a per pixel basis. As seen in the video, the display runs at a higher (and stable) 84Hz refresh rate than the stock 80Hz thanks to some tuning.
You can find the work Hrdl has been doing here: https://git.sr.ht/~hrdl/linux
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Alyx Hinata 🇹🇩🚫
💀
alyx@gameliberty.club
@carbonatedcaffeine Impressive. But what always worries me about using e-ink displays this way, does it not eliminate the primary benefit of using e-ink in the first place: that is using very little energy to display a static image for a long time?
I don't see how using e-ink as a screen for displaying videos or any kind of highly interactive elements would still out-compete other display technologies. I know it's hardly a great comparison, but I've seen how well my Kobo battery holds when reading a book, vs reading a manga (even when I limit full refreshes to an extreme). Refreshing pixels seems to be heavily energy costly, so the efficiency comes from how long you keep a pixel static.
So I'd be curious to see a power usage comparison between an e-ink screen and a LCD or OLED one, in an heavy use case like this one. Can it still maintain any energy benefit if you have a heavy work load, instead of just reading and occasionally take a note?
I've always been fascinated with e-ink as a technology, and love the efficiency it can bring in select tasks. But at some point, it always seemed that employing them as say, a regular Android/Linux screen comes with more drawbacks than benefits.
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Android uses the kernel, Linux - what you are thinking about is Android vs GNU/Linux.
Traditional e-ink needs 0 electricity to display an image for months - it only needs a bit of electricity to draw it.
The point of e-paper is to look like paper and if it looks like paper and it's runs at 84Hz, that's great (although it's kind of odd to get an inherently stable technology and somehow make it unstable, but I guess you can with enough research).
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@Suiseiseki lol, I think I figured out why Fosstodon blocks users from this instance.
I recently learned tonight that a refresh rate doesn't exist for e-ink displays. So I'm not exactly sure what it's measuring. But it's higher than the original setting. The display can hold a still image just fine without consuming power.
Also why did you bring Android into this 🤣.
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The post I was replying to mentioned Android.
e-ink displays have a refresh rate, but it's usually measured seconds between frames.
The video shows an e-paper display that clearly has a refresh rate >30Hz.
I suspect that the still image will fade after a few hours on a high-refresh rate e-paper display unless some magic has been implemented.
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@spyro this is an Arch based system that was configured by hrdl for the PineNote.
Users interested can find instructions on installing it here: https://github.com/hrdl-github/pinenote-arch
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snacks
snacks
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