Esquire’s hackable e-paper display

posted Jul 30th 2008 8:00pm by Eliot Phillips
filed under: news

In celebration of there 75th year, Esquire magazine’s October issue will feature an e-paper cover. The display will be about 3mm thick flexible paper with four shades of gray and some animated text and images. The backside will also have a display featuring a Ford ad for the new Flex. The Ford ad is essentially subsidizing this whole production. The cover isn’t finalized yet, but Boing Boing Gadgets was able to get a few more details about it from deputy editor [Peter Griffin]. The battery isn’t anything exotic and they fully expect people to break the device open and do what they want with it. It will unfortunately still require you building your own controller, but at least you get two revolutionary displays to play with for the cost of a magazine. If you’re wondering what Esquire is, they apparently showed George Clooney 2 Girls 1 Cup. So they’ve got that to celebrate too.

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tagged: digital, eink, epaper, esquire, esquiremagazine, magazine, paper

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Now if only I could get my cotton-picking mitts on one down here in Australia somehow… :S

Posted at 8:51 pm on Jul 30th, 2008 by pelrun

i hope they def do this, im signing up for the 12 month sub just to make sure i can get it, btw to the guy above me contact me at nutz4hs (A) yahoo DOT com, maybe we can strike a deal, im in the usa.

Posted at 9:41 pm on Jul 30th, 2008 by ted

“if you’re wondering what esquire is, they apparently showed george clooney 2 girls 1 cup.”

Wow, you can’t come up with a better and more hacker related way to explain Esquire magazine???? Hello??? The Secrets of the Little Blue Box??? Sheesh, you guys need to read more.

http://www.lospadres.info/thorg/lbb.html

Posted at 10:29 pm on Jul 30th, 2008 by AntiMPAAman

I know Esquire from their article covering Captain Crunch’s activities in the seventies ‘Secrets of the little blue box’ or something like that it was called.

Posted at 10:30 pm on Jul 30th, 2008 by Tachyon

I’d give my left nut to see Clooney’s reaction to that clip.

Posted at 12:08 am on Jul 31st, 2008 by barry99705

to number 4
that could be arranged…..

Posted at 1:06 am on Jul 31st, 2008 by Hockeytree

wow that is awesome i will be picking one up for sure, not quite sure what i’ll do do with it, but i’ll figure something out.

Posted at 2:00 am on Jul 31st, 2008 by cliff

I really doubt this is anything but a big version of one of those games where the “screen” is just different pictures that become illuminated, like the old table top nintendo games

Posted at 3:42 am on Jul 31st, 2008 by bobsmith

to number 4, your right nut gets lonely, i can personally attest to this.

Posted at 4:30 am on Jul 31st, 2008 by savant

#2 How many of them could you get? :) There are thousands of hackers all over the world that would like to get one. I’m one of them.

Posted at 5:59 am on Jul 31st, 2008 by aoeu

Be warned the comment at the bottom of the NY Times coverage suggests this may not be included in the subscription copies!!!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/business/media/21esquire.html?_r=1&ref=tech&oref=slogin

Posted at 6:57 am on Jul 31st, 2008 by bWare

well, i live in phila so there are easily hundreds of places near me to buy them, ill sell that at exact cost+ shipping to wherever

Posted at 7:28 am on Jul 31st, 2008 by ted

“The electronic cover will be used in only 100,000 copies that go to newsstands â its overall circulation is about 720,000″

looks like #9 is correct with that.

Posted at 7:33 am on Jul 31st, 2008 by ted

Damn, have already subscribed. Guess there is no chance to buy one in Germany…

Posted at 7:58 am on Jul 31st, 2008 by German

i was able to contact someone at esquire regarding availability and here is a direct quote.

“The E-Ink issues will be available only at Borders, Barnes & Noble and select newsstands. Only 100,000 of them will existâit is simply too expensive to create more of them. Thanks for your interest. “

Posted at 8:58 am on Jul 31st, 2008 by Sniperman

Description at boingboing matches “ink-in-motion” described here: http://www.eink.com/products/ink_in_motion.html It’s a segmented display, not dot-matrix.

I have a TFT on glass active matrix from an ancient laptop, and I wonder if I manage to separate electrodes from the e-ink film.

Posted at 9:19 am on Jul 31st, 2008 by aoeu

Thinking about this some more, it is unlikely to be a matrix display. They will probably just flash pre-cut segments.

Ignoring the e-paper, the accompanying electronics to display a pixel based animation at an acceptable resolution (i.e. good enough to recognise the logos) wouldn’t run continuously for 90 days.

Anyone know enough about e-paper (specifically e-Ink’s) to comment on whether re-laminating the e-ink layer onto your own matrix of electrodes might work?

Still anyone willing to ship one to England please contact me at bware, iware, co, uk with more traditional punctuation.

Posted at 10:32 am on Jul 31st, 2008 by bWare

@ #13
Damn. I just bought a year’s subscription for $7 from amazon. Not the worst waste of money ever but hopefully my B&N will get it and it won’t disappear before I can get my greasy mits on it.

Posted at 11:48 am on Jul 31st, 2008 by will

How do you figure? E-paper is supposed to use a very tiny amount of power. The electronics themselves don’t necessarily need a lot of power either. Unlike LCDs, I don’t think “pre-cut segments” would save a significant amount of power.

Posted at 12:04 pm on Jul 31st, 2008 by sitwon

Sweet, my mom works at a Barns & Nobel’s.

I will get every copy they have and STRAIGHT to e-bay!

Posted at 12:58 pm on Jul 31st, 2008 by epicelite

That’s great until the battery runs out, then you’ll be like “I can’t read my magazine cuz print was too low-tech for them.”

Also, you know what they’ll make next? “Please deposit 25 cents for an additional 15 minutes of reading.” Also, the articles will change to ads while you’re reading them.

Posted at 1:47 pm on Jul 31st, 2008 by BitMage

For those of you who jump to conclusions…

E-paper doesn’t use Any power to display an image, only to CHANGE what’s being displayed. So once you make it display a picture/text/etc, it will continue to show it for a few gazillion years, powered or not, unless something powers it up and tells it to change the image. It also doesn’t have a backlight. All this means it takes only a teeny tiny trickle of power to run the animated cover on that magazine. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it lasted a few months on some coin cells.

Anyone know if these will be sold in Canada?

Posted at 5:27 pm on Jul 31st, 2008 by Jax184

Would it be possible to just change the eeprom or what ever chip they use to store the pictures? Or maybe even somehow stream the picture or text from a sd card? :S

Posted at 12:17 pm on Aug 1st, 2008 by hak8or

if only electronic ink could correct grammar somehow….

Posted at 12:26 pm on Aug 1st, 2008 by tek

I wonder how hard it would be to turn one of these into an ebook reader. surely someone here could design something better than the Kindle.

Posted at 2:45 pm on Aug 2nd, 2008 by dakaling

nr 10 could you send one to belgium? contact me at: yonsje (at) gmail (dot) com

Posted at 5:32 am on Aug 14th, 2008 by chaos theory

I picked this up on Friday. Here it is disassembled:

http://flickr.com/photos/just_mike/sets/72157607133868125/

I think you’re all going to be pretty dissapointed, as it seems fairly certain the individual “pixels” are not addressable.

Posted at 6:33 am on Sep 7th, 2008 by just mike

I think that we need to have a few serious hardware hackers take a look at it and see what the possibilities are. There is a pretty good write up over in the slashdot comments where someone actual started mapping out the pins and has all the board info
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=957583&cid=24930139
I bought one, for when my skills are up to it (ok so I’m dreaming a bit), or someone starts making really neat projects for it.

Posted at 8:31 am on Sep 20th, 2008 by varne

I have 4 of these available. contact me at email. paypal only.

Posted at 6:50 am on Oct 1st, 2008 by paddlegal

Esquire’s hackable e-paper display

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