Those aren't build logs. Those are "I took an open source software package and put commercial hardware around it."
Which is fine, since it's MIT software (and why I push for GPL, personally). What's not fine is a creator calling their commercial product "open" or "DIY" without a BOM or build log.
I would revise the post title regardless of what the author calls it, personally.
2
Fmstrat @lemmy.world - 17hr
I posted this as a comment on the creator's post. Will have to see if they respond.
I see "open" in the title, but no git or Bill of Materials (BOM) links. Is this actually open? Or based on other's open efforts?
1
FreeBeard @slrpnk.net - 2day
Looks really nice. How much do you want for one? Surely not more than twice as much as the competition needs. /s
33
RaoulDuke25 @lemmy.dbzer0.com - 2day
I'll wait until they make one with 300 screens I can flip like a book.
56
errer @lemmy.world - 2day
And each screen has infinite battery life! Oh and each is as flexible and light as I dunno, a sheet of paper maybe!
19
Redjard - 1day
imagine a book you could plug in to change into a different book
7
TheReanuKeeves @lemmy.world - 1day
I want VR recreations of famous libraries with full on books you can take off the shelves to read and homeless people washing their feet in the bathroom sinks
2
solrize @lemmy.ml - 2day
pair of 648×480 e-paper displays
Um lol no. I could see using a pair of Inkplate 10's connected by (at least metaphorical)) duct tape. Doesn't seem worth mucking with special hardware.
Every affordable e-reader I know of is simply too small though. I mostly want to read stuff like ArXiV preprints (A4 sized pdf's) so would want at least a 13" screen. Someone a few days ago posted a link to a 14" Android tablet with a semi-reflective display at around $300. It seemed interesting but I'd rather degoogle.
There are some hinged Waveshare displays that look nice but they are regular TFT displays so wouldn't be great for a portable e-reader with long battery time:
I hope you get what you want. Me I want something I could put in my pocket.
17
Jason2357 @lemmy.ca - 2day
The small kobo kinda fits in a jean pocket, easily in cargo shorts or inside jacket pocket. Only comfortable for reading novels though. I prefer a little bigger even if it isnt pocket size.
3
mesa - 19hr
I do like the old kobos. Fully hackable.
I like dedicated devices for things rather than all in ones. If you have the money of course.
2
solrize @lemmy.ml - 2day
Oh hmm, I just use my phone for that. It doesn't seem worth having an additional, limited purpose device. I assume a 7" e-reader is too big for a pocket.
The Inkplate 10 isn't pocketable but it's very light, easy to put in your backpack or whatever. I just wish they had a 13" version. The 13" Ipad Air is really very nice if you don't mind Apple products.
There are also some folding phones now with largish screens. A buddy of mine has one and it's nice. Too expensive for me though, and it's more Android.
2
FrederikNJS @sopuli.xyz - 1day
Yeah most 7" readers have the page turning buttons on the side which usually makes the device too wide for pockets.
The 6" readers fit my pocket quite well... So a foldable dual screen 6" sound like a pretty nice upgrade.
Most of what I use my readers for are reflowable text like epubs... But I guess if you could show a single page from a PDF across both screens then it might actually be big enough to be able to read while still being pocketable... You would probably want to go with the high resolution e-ink screens, like the one in the Kobo Clara HD (1072 x 1448). A combined resolution of two of those would be 2144 x 1448,
2
Wolf314159 @startrek.website - 1day
Being able to fold down a larger "sheet" display so that it fit in a pocket would be pretty cool. Having extra room for reading things like maps and comic books is so much better than pinching and zooming on a pocket sized display. What you call limited purpose, I call functional design. I'm kind of over all-in-one devices. They've turned into Jack of all trades, but master of none.
Obviously that's not what this device is, but it got me thinking about why I'd want a device with multiple e-ink displays or a foldable display.
2
hovercat - 1day
I just upgraded to a foldable phone and it's a game changer to have an 8in screen in your pocket. Reading long form content is so much more enjoyable, and I'd love to have an E-ink reader that folds like my phone does.
1
solrize @lemmy.ml - 24hr
My buddy's folding Samsung phone is really cool and you might look into it. It unfolds to a single screen of maybe 10" diagonal and square perspective. I think for full page PDFs though, I need something bigger so I've given up on pocketability.
1
ranzispa @mander.xyz - 1day
Hello there, just scrolling through and I saw your comment. You seem to know a bit about this topic.
I'm currently thinking of buying a reader as I lost mine some time ago. I used a kobo and a kindle in the past and didn't see much difference.
However, this thing about reading papers seems really cool. I have tried in the past reading PDFs on those readers without much success.
Do you think you have good options for reading articles/manuals?
Consider I end up printing about 50 pages a day in articles I read. If I can turn that into something digital that'd be cool.
5
Anivia @feddit.org - 1day
If an 8-inch screen is enough for you, then I recommend either the Pocketbook Inkpad 4, or the Pocketbook Color 3 if you want color. They run Linux and have a very capable PDF Reader (especially compared to Kindles)
If you want an even bigger screen then sadly they start to get very expensive, and usually ship with an already outdated version of Android and an underpowered SOC. And they also have the terrible standby battery life you would expect from an Android device
3
ranzispa @mander.xyz - 1day
I guess the size is good to me for reading. I guess the kindle and kobo I used to have were even smaller than that. For reading books that's quite good to me and I never felt I needed something larger.
However, when I tried to read PDFs I had lots of problems. The readers either would show the full A4 page in the screen, which would make it unreadable, or show just a piece of the page and it would then be difficult to pan.
I remember I had tried using some tools which would break up the PDF pages into pages which would be visualizable in such a screen, but that did not work too well especially when reading articles with two column layouts.
Ideally articles would be available as ePub, but that's quite rare.
The main point would be: if I get one such tool to read articles I can dedicate it to just that. But, I need it to be easy for such purpose: I don't want to be panning up and down a page all the time.
I don't know whether that is possible and how that could work however, because indeed resizing is not one of the objectives of PDF.
1
mesa - 19hr
I've had luck with web2epub on Firefox. Web articles become epubs which work well with eink readers. PDF is such a storage format cause its many formats under a trench coat. If you find a good solution for those let me know. Even calibre isn't perfect.
1
solrize @lemmy.ml - 24hr
I'm still looking for a good answer myself! There are lots of possibilities but all have drawbacks from my perspective. I guess the 13" Onyx Boox sounds nice if you don't mind the cost. I haven't tried it though. Same with the 14" TCL Android tablet if you don't mind Android.
2
Jason2357 @lemmy.ca - 2day
EInk gets expensive fast as the size gets bigger. At 10” its hard not to just use an lcd and bigger battery.
1
ChilledPeppers @lemmy.dbzer0.com - 2day
Give PineTab a look. Pine64 makes open source hardware that is pretty cool.
1
Hildegarde - 1day
You probably mean the PineNote, the 10 inch eink tablet. Pinetab is a normal tablet with a lcd screen.
It's just 10" and looks like an old design. Micro USB, oops. The Inkplate is 10" ESP32 epaper so it uses very little power. Alternatively there are tablet-style x86 laptops and I almost bought one last year. Now the price is way up due to DRAM shortages and so on, oops. I have some scrounged HDMI monitors so I want to try using one in portrait mode with my raspberry pi 400. If that works I could see getting one of the Waveshare dual screen monitors and maybe a Pi 500+.
2
tired_n_bored - 1day
I don't like the fact that it has two displays. It's unnecessary and makes it thicker and heavier.
18
winkerjadams @lemmy.dbzer0.com - 1day
How else would it recreate a book unless it had a folding display which would be even worse?
4
tired_n_bored - 1day
Books are made like this because it's impossible to make them any other way, but a digital device can have just one "page" since you read one page at time like Kindles and Kobos
11
bluGill - 1day
The other option is a scroll. historicaly I'm told a book was always a scroll and the factor we now call a book was a codex. (I don't know how to verify this)
3
nyan @lemmy.cafe - 1day
For some people, recreating the form factor of a book is the point, regardless of its convenience or cost. I'm sure whoever put this thing together was quite aware of how mainstream e-readers are built and didn't want that, or they would have bought a Kindle or a Kobo.
3
Zink @programming.dev - 1day
I can imagine a future device with an e-ink page that's so thin and flexible that it looks and feels like a paper book with magic changing text. I don't know how many consumers would pay a premium for that, but I would definitely buy my wife one.
2
Simulation6 @sopuli.xyz - 1day
Go old school and have it recreate a scroll. Really, not having to shift your head/eyes when reading is a plus with r-readers.
6
Yggstyle - 1day
Nevermind the fact most readers and tablets come -with- a cover ... So its almost like a book anyway. Which people fold behind the page. Like a book. What was that extra screen doing again?
1
Passerby6497 @lemmy.world - 1day
a cover ... Which people fold behind the page. Like a book.
Ho ho hold the fuck up
2
Yggstyle - 1day
Mind blown.
1
SkavarSharraddas - 1day
I like the concept. I have a e-ink reader where I removed the hull because it's annoying, but at some point I must have damaged the display a bit and now it has a little black spot. With this the added bulk also doubles the area available for text. Maybe not that useful for novels that you read through linearly, but for non-fiction it would be nice to see other chapters, glossaries, etc. on one display while keeping the other at the page you were reading. Mainly a problem of software and enough buttons to be able to comfortably use that.
Though the low-res displays of this prototype look atrocious to me (pixelation and uneven blackness), maybe a later version will improve on that.
4
VeryFrugal - 1day
Not a big fan of having 2 screens.
A huge fan of ESP32 DIY E-Reader!
11
PumpkinSkink @lemmy.world - 1day
Great. Now i can get that "real book feeling" of wrestling the books pages to lie flat enough for me to read them as I lay down.
11
Foofighter @discuss.tchncs.de - 1day
Why not hundreds of screens so you can present all pages of a book at the same time and you just skip through the screen? Would be so much more convenient and innovative!
10
bampop @lemmy.world - 1day
I'd get a whole bunch of these and keep a different book on each one, so you could just pick it up and read it. But it'll never work, it's too much trouble to keep them all charged.
3
Foofighter @discuss.tchncs.de - 19hr
That's very smart!
I think I see a business opportunity here.
One could Design covers for each device so that you can identify them easily when they are standing next to each other. I bet these can be placed a lot a similar price as phone shells. If only we could find a solution to the charging problem.
1
markko @lemmy.world - 1day
The only reason I'd want 2 "pages" is so I could close it to protect the screen(s)... but that's exactly what covers are for.
Apart from the tiny minority of people who might prefer the form factor/"book feel", are there any actual advantages to having 2 screens for general reading?
8
Jtotheb @lemmy.world - 1day
It’s probably just for the people who want it. I have thought about how much nicer two pages would be in the past for this reason and for displaying sheet music.
7
markko @lemmy.world - 1day
I did consider less common uses like that, which is why I specified "general reading". I prefer paper for my sheet music, but I'd choose something with a faster refresh rate than e-ink if I had to use something with a screen anyway.
1
yobasari @feddit.org - 23hr
Could also be useful for doing research with ebooks. Maybe show a list of bookmarks or the table of contents on one screen and the text on the other screen. Or you could compare different texts easier, showing one on one screen and one on the other.
Or use one screen for notes.
But I guess people that need to actually do productive research will use a desktop anyways.
6
SoleInvictus - 21hr
Yes! This exactly. I'm learning Italian and having a dictionary open on one side would be awesome.
1
pleaseletmein @lemmy.zip - 24hr
I would like to be able to get comics and manga in ebook form. I’ve always had to go with the print versions because two-page spreads end up looking bad/being more confusing to read on my ereader thanks to the single page display.
4
mister_flibble @sh.itjust.works - 1day
It would probably work really well for graphic novels, since they do occasionally have panels or illustrations that span both pages.
2
Yggstyle - 1day
Look. Hackaday... If it's a slow week... We get it. Take a day off. We still like you. Just... Less of this please.
7
selokichtli @lemmy.ml - 1day
Waste of energy.
3
aceshigh @lemmy.world - 23hr
Great idea. Less having to turn pages.
2
nutsack @lemmy.dbzer0.com - 1day
looks like shit no thanks
2
DylanMc6 [any, any] - 22hr
Why DIDN'T Amazon do that for the Kindle?
2
AizawaC47 - 20hr
Just I am waiting for Amazon to one day create something like Boox Palma 1/2 but that makes too much sense to give us something we can put in our pocket. I don’t know why they lack innovation. One day though…
2
rossman @lemmy.zip - 22hr
oo we can bring back 2 page spreads, probably 2x price though.
mesamunefire in technology @lemmy.world
DIY E-Reader Folds Open Like A Book (Diptyx)
https://hackaday.com/2025/12/24/diy-e-reader-folds-open-like-a-book/Another link: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Diptyx-E-reader-A-new-DIY-book-shaped-dual-screen-device-that-s-also-DRM-free.1146189.0.html
Did I miss something? Title is “DIY” but it looks like a sales page?
Welcome to modern astroturfing in the social media age.
There is a build page on the github for the device.
I see no link to GitHub, but I do see two links to crowd supply.
There's no such link. Can't even find one through Google
Is there? Mind sharing the link?
I'll find it after Christmas. I got a fork a bit ago when looking at the code.
I think its based on https://github.com/atomic14/diy-esp32-epub-reader
Build logs: https://hackaday.io/project/204323-diptyx-e-reader
Those aren't build logs. Those are "I took an open source software package and put commercial hardware around it."
Which is fine, since it's MIT software (and why I push for GPL, personally). What's not fine is a creator calling their commercial product "open" or "DIY" without a BOM or build log.
I would revise the post title regardless of what the author calls it, personally.
I posted this as a comment on the creator's post. Will have to see if they respond.
Looks really nice. How much do you want for one? Surely not more than twice as much as the competition needs. /s
I'll wait until they make one with 300 screens I can flip like a book.
And each screen has infinite battery life! Oh and each is as flexible and light as I dunno, a sheet of paper maybe!
imagine a book you could plug in to change into a different book
I want VR recreations of famous libraries with full on books you can take off the shelves to read and homeless people washing their feet in the bathroom sinks
Um lol no. I could see using a pair of Inkplate 10's connected by (at least metaphorical)) duct tape. Doesn't seem worth mucking with special hardware.
Every affordable e-reader I know of is simply too small though. I mostly want to read stuff like ArXiV preprints (A4 sized pdf's) so would want at least a 13" screen. Someone a few days ago posted a link to a 14" Android tablet with a semi-reflective display at around $300. It seemed interesting but I'd rather degoogle.
There are some hinged Waveshare displays that look nice but they are regular TFT displays so wouldn't be great for a portable e-reader with long battery time:
https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/15.6inch-dual-monitor.htm
I hope you get what you want. Me I want something I could put in my pocket.
The small kobo kinda fits in a jean pocket, easily in cargo shorts or inside jacket pocket. Only comfortable for reading novels though. I prefer a little bigger even if it isnt pocket size.
I do like the old kobos. Fully hackable.
I like dedicated devices for things rather than all in ones. If you have the money of course.
Oh hmm, I just use my phone for that. It doesn't seem worth having an additional, limited purpose device. I assume a 7" e-reader is too big for a pocket.
The Inkplate 10 isn't pocketable but it's very light, easy to put in your backpack or whatever. I just wish they had a 13" version. The 13" Ipad Air is really very nice if you don't mind Apple products.
There are also some folding phones now with largish screens. A buddy of mine has one and it's nice. Too expensive for me though, and it's more Android.
Yeah most 7" readers have the page turning buttons on the side which usually makes the device too wide for pockets.
The 6" readers fit my pocket quite well... So a foldable dual screen 6" sound like a pretty nice upgrade.
Most of what I use my readers for are reflowable text like epubs... But I guess if you could show a single page from a PDF across both screens then it might actually be big enough to be able to read while still being pocketable... You would probably want to go with the high resolution e-ink screens, like the one in the Kobo Clara HD (1072 x 1448). A combined resolution of two of those would be 2144 x 1448,
Being able to fold down a larger "sheet" display so that it fit in a pocket would be pretty cool. Having extra room for reading things like maps and comic books is so much better than pinching and zooming on a pocket sized display. What you call limited purpose, I call functional design. I'm kind of over all-in-one devices. They've turned into Jack of all trades, but master of none.
Obviously that's not what this device is, but it got me thinking about why I'd want a device with multiple e-ink displays or a foldable display.
I just upgraded to a foldable phone and it's a game changer to have an 8in screen in your pocket. Reading long form content is so much more enjoyable, and I'd love to have an E-ink reader that folds like my phone does.
My buddy's folding Samsung phone is really cool and you might look into it. It unfolds to a single screen of maybe 10" diagonal and square perspective. I think for full page PDFs though, I need something bigger so I've given up on pocketability.
Hello there, just scrolling through and I saw your comment. You seem to know a bit about this topic. I'm currently thinking of buying a reader as I lost mine some time ago. I used a kobo and a kindle in the past and didn't see much difference. However, this thing about reading papers seems really cool. I have tried in the past reading PDFs on those readers without much success.
Do you think you have good options for reading articles/manuals? Consider I end up printing about 50 pages a day in articles I read. If I can turn that into something digital that'd be cool.
If an 8-inch screen is enough for you, then I recommend either the Pocketbook Inkpad 4, or the Pocketbook Color 3 if you want color. They run Linux and have a very capable PDF Reader (especially compared to Kindles)
If you want an even bigger screen then sadly they start to get very expensive, and usually ship with an already outdated version of Android and an underpowered SOC. And they also have the terrible standby battery life you would expect from an Android device
I guess the size is good to me for reading. I guess the kindle and kobo I used to have were even smaller than that. For reading books that's quite good to me and I never felt I needed something larger.
However, when I tried to read PDFs I had lots of problems. The readers either would show the full A4 page in the screen, which would make it unreadable, or show just a piece of the page and it would then be difficult to pan. I remember I had tried using some tools which would break up the PDF pages into pages which would be visualizable in such a screen, but that did not work too well especially when reading articles with two column layouts.
Ideally articles would be available as ePub, but that's quite rare. The main point would be: if I get one such tool to read articles I can dedicate it to just that. But, I need it to be easy for such purpose: I don't want to be panning up and down a page all the time. I don't know whether that is possible and how that could work however, because indeed resizing is not one of the objectives of PDF.
I've had luck with web2epub on Firefox. Web articles become epubs which work well with eink readers. PDF is such a storage format cause its many formats under a trench coat. If you find a good solution for those let me know. Even calibre isn't perfect.
I'm still looking for a good answer myself! There are lots of possibilities but all have drawbacks from my perspective. I guess the 13" Onyx Boox sounds nice if you don't mind the cost. I haven't tried it though. Same with the 14" TCL Android tablet if you don't mind Android.
EInk gets expensive fast as the size gets bigger. At 10” its hard not to just use an lcd and bigger battery.
Give PineTab a look. Pine64 makes open source hardware that is pretty cool.
You probably mean the PineNote, the 10 inch eink tablet. Pinetab is a normal tablet with a lcd screen.
This? https://pine64.org/devices/pinetab/
It's just 10" and looks like an old design. Micro USB, oops. The Inkplate is 10" ESP32 epaper so it uses very little power. Alternatively there are tablet-style x86 laptops and I almost bought one last year. Now the price is way up due to DRAM shortages and so on, oops. I have some scrounged HDMI monitors so I want to try using one in portrait mode with my raspberry pi 400. If that works I could see getting one of the Waveshare dual screen monitors and maybe a Pi 500+.
I don't like the fact that it has two displays. It's unnecessary and makes it thicker and heavier.
How else would it recreate a book unless it had a folding display which would be even worse?
Books are made like this because it's impossible to make them any other way, but a digital device can have just one "page" since you read one page at time like Kindles and Kobos
The other option is a scroll. historicaly I'm told a book was always a scroll and the factor we now call a book was a codex. (I don't know how to verify this)
For some people, recreating the form factor of a book is the point, regardless of its convenience or cost. I'm sure whoever put this thing together was quite aware of how mainstream e-readers are built and didn't want that, or they would have bought a Kindle or a Kobo.
I can imagine a future device with an e-ink page that's so thin and flexible that it looks and feels like a paper book with magic changing text. I don't know how many consumers would pay a premium for that, but I would definitely buy my wife one.
Go old school and have it recreate a scroll. Really, not having to shift your head/eyes when reading is a plus with r-readers.
Nevermind the fact most readers and tablets come -with- a cover ... So its almost like a book anyway. Which people fold behind the page. Like a book. What was that extra screen doing again?
Ho ho hold the fuck up
Mind blown.
I like the concept. I have a e-ink reader where I removed the hull because it's annoying, but at some point I must have damaged the display a bit and now it has a little black spot. With this the added bulk also doubles the area available for text. Maybe not that useful for novels that you read through linearly, but for non-fiction it would be nice to see other chapters, glossaries, etc. on one display while keeping the other at the page you were reading. Mainly a problem of software and enough buttons to be able to comfortably use that.
Though the low-res displays of this prototype look atrocious to me (pixelation and uneven blackness), maybe a later version will improve on that.
Not a big fan of having 2 screens.
A huge fan of ESP32 DIY E-Reader!
Great. Now i can get that "real book feeling" of wrestling the books pages to lie flat enough for me to read them as I lay down.
Why not hundreds of screens so you can present all pages of a book at the same time and you just skip through the screen? Would be so much more convenient and innovative!
I'd get a whole bunch of these and keep a different book on each one, so you could just pick it up and read it. But it'll never work, it's too much trouble to keep them all charged.
That's very smart!
I think I see a business opportunity here. One could Design covers for each device so that you can identify them easily when they are standing next to each other. I bet these can be placed a lot a similar price as phone shells. If only we could find a solution to the charging problem.
The only reason I'd want 2 "pages" is so I could close it to protect the screen(s)... but that's exactly what covers are for.
Apart from the tiny minority of people who might prefer the form factor/"book feel", are there any actual advantages to having 2 screens for general reading?
It’s probably just for the people who want it. I have thought about how much nicer two pages would be in the past for this reason and for displaying sheet music.
I did consider less common uses like that, which is why I specified "general reading". I prefer paper for my sheet music, but I'd choose something with a faster refresh rate than e-ink if I had to use something with a screen anyway.
Could also be useful for doing research with ebooks. Maybe show a list of bookmarks or the table of contents on one screen and the text on the other screen. Or you could compare different texts easier, showing one on one screen and one on the other. Or use one screen for notes. But I guess people that need to actually do productive research will use a desktop anyways.
Yes! This exactly. I'm learning Italian and having a dictionary open on one side would be awesome.
I would like to be able to get comics and manga in ebook form. I’ve always had to go with the print versions because two-page spreads end up looking bad/being more confusing to read on my ereader thanks to the single page display.
It would probably work really well for graphic novels, since they do occasionally have panels or illustrations that span both pages.
Look. Hackaday... If it's a slow week... We get it. Take a day off. We still like you. Just... Less of this please.
Waste of energy.
Great idea. Less having to turn pages.
looks like shit no thanks
Why DIDN'T Amazon do that for the Kindle?
Just I am waiting for Amazon to one day create something like Boox Palma 1/2 but that makes too much sense to give us something we can put in our pocket. I don’t know why they lack innovation. One day though…
oo we can bring back 2 page spreads, probably 2x price though.