I’m not suggesting this is a product people should buy to read on. It’s an 2.9" e-ink dev kit by Pimoroni I thought I’d experiment with as an extremely basic reader. I was particularly interested in the Badger card as I prefer small pocket readers, and suspected I could make one that’s smaller and lighter than what’s currently available as an out of the box ereader.
https://preview.redd.it/aoj77rwunsja...abled&310373a8
PROS
- Good value (£49/$59 for the Badger card, charging adapter, 500mah battery and a 3D printed backplate)
- Possibly the most comfortable ereader to hold
- Possibly the lightest ereader at 42g
- Fits jeans watch pocket
- Customisable software (micropython, lots of examples provided)
- USB C
- Physical page turn controls
- No layers on top of eink
CONS
- Only txt files using example code, and it’s fussy about special characters
- Not grayscale, so pixel font
- Only one good pixel font preloaded on the card (I’m doubling it’s size so a pixel font designed to be larger would be better)
- No light
- OS battery indicator doesn’t work
- Battery needs to be disconnected to charge it with a special adapter
- Only 1MB of available storage - most novels in .txt format will fit, some will not (not sure how hard it is to add an sd card)
Some things I changed in the reader code to make it usable for me:
- Font (the defaults in the ereader code weren’t designed for non-grayscale screens)
- Removed constant UI graphics
- Increased refresh from fast to turbo as flashing the screen between every page was too distracting and slow (still a bit slow and with some ghosting)
Once it’s setup for a book it’s pretty nice to read on, so I’ll try it as my day reader for a while.