02-13-2009, 05:49 AM | #1 | |
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Moto demoes Android-powered E Ink display
Over at Engadget you can have a look at the "Android-powered E-Ink display" proof of concept by MOTO Development Group (originally from here).
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Related: Znet suggests Kindroid (Android on Kindle) |
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02-13-2009, 05:56 AM | #2 |
http://is.gd/4flJX
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Android is a very promising technology. I'd love to see it used in a commercially available e-ink gadget.
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02-13-2009, 06:15 AM | #3 |
reader
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See also Android on E-Ink, which is Android running directly on the AM300 prototyping kit. This gives direct access to the Epson controler, but the kit does not come with much memory or with a powerful processor.
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02-13-2009, 06:45 AM | #4 |
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Hi there. I saw the Moto labs video on vimeo day before yesterday and tried contacting them to see if they were interested in collaborating. I tried leaving a comment on their blog site but it looks like they've deleted the link to my video and my article when I checked just now. No idea why. Their architecture is odd in the sense that you've got an OMAP cpu on the beagle running android but then the xscale cpu with 64MB of ram on the E-Ink kit doing nothing! but receiving image files over USB? Odd implementation that may not really be viable methinks. I think the broadsheetfb architecture which I've been pushing is much simpler. Just a typical framebuffer driver. No USB, no external host needed. Just run it on the kit itself. So you don't need 2 CPUs to run Android. One cpu, one display, one touchscreen is enough! Yeah, the xscale is a wee slugish but as you can see from the video of android on e-ink and fennec on e-ink that Wallcraft linked to (thx btw), it does the job fine for most circumstances. A bit more time and optimization work (which I'm doing on my weekends) and we should be good to go. :-)
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02-13-2009, 06:51 AM | #5 |
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i forgot to mention, it is odd that the Moto guy in the video blames the flashing on the E-Ink display itself. That's a driver issue and not a hardware issue. You'll notice in my videos, I've got flashing down to quite a minimum, for example, this one where I draw on the kit, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_mLKQXcsgY , there is little to no flashing at all.
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02-13-2009, 07:20 AM | #6 | |
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Really fine job you did there, jayakumar. Looking forward to hear more from you |
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02-13-2009, 12:12 PM | #7 | |
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=X= |
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02-13-2009, 05:40 PM | #8 |
Manic Do Fuse
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I did not know that demoeing is the hip thing to do. I just spent money to have my reader moooed.
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02-13-2009, 06:09 PM | #9 | |
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You're absolutely right in most of your comments, it's just a proof of concept. In fact, we considered porting Android to Gumstix (we're glad we didn't since you are already there with it!) but we chose the BeagleBoard path simply because it's a more up-to-date development environment and is more capable than the PXA device on the Gumstix. One of our interests here is exposing E-Ink to creative developers - people that are more apt to programming in Java rather than C. The driver is definitely not optimized by any means. But just to clarify, the flashing is needed in every scenario that I've seen in which quality grayscale is required - otherwise you'll get ghosting (many of you have probably seen this before). Going black-to-white can be more responsive, as you've shown. BTW I really like the eyes in your last video there ;-) |
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02-13-2009, 08:00 PM | #10 | ||
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02-13-2009, 08:15 PM | #11 |
Murderous Mustela
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Question: Is it possible to only flash only the parts of the display that have actually changed?
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02-13-2009, 08:16 PM | #12 |
WWHALD
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02-13-2009, 08:18 PM | #13 |
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