Full-color EBook Reader Needs Only 8-bits Of Muscle

[Rossum’s] still coming up with great ways to use his microtouch hardware. This time, he’s taken his inspiration from Amazon’s announcement that a full-color eBook reader (and movie player) is on the way. Judging from the video after the break, his fully functional reader is a big win for the device.

You’re probably familiar with the hardware, an ATmega644-based board connected to a touch sensitive LCD screen. You can make your own or buy one pre-assembled (but currently out-of-stock). The board has a microSD card slot making it quite easy to add books to the device. At the start of the project [Rossum] thought he might be able to read ePub files directly, but the embedded images, and unzip function needed to open the package file is a bit too much for the 8-bit processor’s restrictions. One simple step does the trick. A helper script can be used to format the files before transferring them to the device. This does the unzipping, scales the images, and repaginates the text into a format friendly for the display size.

Now if we only had a nice little case to house the hardware we’d be in business.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=314v1H_aN2o&w=470]

19 thoughts on “Full-color EBook Reader Needs Only 8-bits Of Muscle

  1. I don’t understand how he can update the display so damn fast. With a PIC running at 48MHz just toggling its ports to send data (just filling the screen with alternating solid colours) and absolutely nothing else I can still see the updates. He’s scrolling frigging pictures read from external memory absolutely smooth…

    Very impressive but also extremely frustrating :P

    1. The display he is using has “scroll up/down/left/right” commands, so he only needs to update 1 line at a time during the scrolling. Still impressive, but explains the scrolling a bit ;-)

  2. Wow. That’s awesome.

    If someone can give me a drawing / links to the hardware mech drawings I’ll design & make available a nice case for it…

    Anyone know how many they have sold, over what period? I need to choose an appropriate method of manufacture first…

  3. But that doesn’t defeat the purpose of a e-reader ? I don’t think i could read more than a chapter at time in a lcd screen, but on my kindle 3 things go smooth.

    just saying, still impressed by the quality.

  4. I was really hoping he would move to 32bit ARMs a year ago after the last demo. They cost the same (or even less), are ~7 times faster, >2x ram, have more resources/ios, viable upgrade patch, and are easier to obtain than Atmel chips.

  5. this guy is the bomb. just seeing the picture i knew it was rossum . there is just something about his work that is iconic and sets him a part from the rest. he makes me wish i was that good in electronics .

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