M5Paper e-ink device for DIY

[stevenaleach]

The e-ink screen is bigger than I'd been picturing it - I was afraid the ratio between the two screens would be off visually, but this is just about what I wanted - a display-tag/small information plaque sized display below a "print" sized canvas. I think the little screen is just small enough not to compete visually and to not wind up with "two screens" so much as one screen, and an information area that is clearly related to the main screen but not competing. The white styrofoam shows off the worst case for bezel color -- I think a rather dark matting will be needed to make the screens' "whites" look brighter and less silver/grey. Perhaps a thin book-binding style leather/pseudo-leather in a reasonably dark tone would be most appropriate... but I've got a while before I can worry about wrapping it - back to coding.

[stevenaleach]

I'm to be slowed down a bit on the way to wiring the display by the fact that there's a couple easy improvements I can make to get much better compression for the internal file format for the Knoblet; first, not breaking raw byte blocks for two-byte repeat sequences by adding a not-yet flag, and second to add a second compression pass to the resulting raw arrays where all stretches of pixel-pair bytes who's pixel values stay with in +3 or stay within -3 of any given value (which will be large stretches of the raw blocks) will be encoded a block of four-pixels per byte after a start byte that tells it the default value (0 to 15) and whether the two-byte values are added or subtracted from that value, along with the number of bytes in the block. That should boost the compression quite a bit - especially for scanned documents and images in general. So, of course I have to start working on that because it should boost compression enough to be well worthwhile, while still being very easy for the little micro-controller to work with and it would bug me too much not to do the 'full' implementation the first time and be done with it.... But one-day soon, I *WILL* have some nicely rendered text up on this big beautiful EPD canvas... I'm so relieved that it got here undamaged, and delighted that it did so way faster than originally promised. The Knoblet Will Live!

[hobnail]

Another one using the m5stack m5paper.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYiZOIYzch8

http://www.tnhh.net/posts/zenreader-...nk-reader.html