Since e-ink first hit the market a couple decades back, there’s always murmurs of “that’d be great as a second monitor”— but very, very few monitors have ever been made. When the commecial world is delivering very few options, it leaves room for open source hardware projects, like the Modos Glider and Paper Monitor, projects now seeking funding on Crowd Supply.
As far as PC monitors go, the Modos isn’t going to win many awards on specs alone. The screen is only 13.3″ across, and its resolution maxes out at 1600 x 1200. The refresh rate would be totally unremarkable for a budget LCD, at 75 Hz. This Paper Monitor isn’t an LCD, budget or otherwise, and for e-ink, 75 Hz is a blazing fast refresh rate.
Before you declare noone could get productive work done on such a tiny screen, stop and think that that screen is larger, and refreshing faster, than everyone’s favourite Macintosh. It can even run up to 8x the colour depth, and people got plenty done back in the day with just black-and-white. Some people still do.
Now that we’ve defended the idea, let’s get to the good part: it’s not just a monitor being crowdsourced. The driver board, called Glider, is fully open with code and design files on the Modos Labs GitHub repository. We sometimes complain about what counts as open hardware, but these guys are the true quill. Glider is using an FPGA with a custom clever configuration to get screens refreshing at that impressive 75 Hz. With the appropriate panel (there’s a list on Git– you’ll need an E Ink branded display, but you aren’t limited to the 13.3″ panel) the board can drive every pixel independently, forcing updates only on those pixels that need them. That’s an impressive trick and we’re not surprised it needed an FPGA to pull off. (It uses a Xilinx Spartan 6, for the record, running a config called Casper)
Because everything is open source, you can do things like you see in the API demo video (embedded below), where every panel in what looks like a tiled display manager is running a different picture mode. (There are more demo videos at the CrowdSupply page). We’re not sure how often that would come up in actual use– that functionality is not yet exposed to a window manager, for example, though it may yet be. Perhaps more interesting is the ability to customize specific refresh modes oneself, rather than relying on someone else’s idea of what a “browsing” or “gaming” mode should be.
For anyone interested, there’s still time to get in on the ground floor: the campaign on CrowdSupply ends September 18, 2025 at 04:59 PM PDT, and has levels to nab yourself a dev kit. It’s 599 USD for the 13″ and 199 USD for a 6″ version. (It’s the same board, just different displays.) For anyone not interested, there is no deadline for not buying things, and it usually costs nothing.
Thanks to [moneppo] for the tip!
I wonder about the power consumption at this refresh rate…
Me too, but the sunlight readability should be superior and less than a lit display, which is where eInk really ‘shines’
The driver board under continuous use draws about 1 to 1.5W. I also recommend the article below that goes into some detail.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/modos-tech/modos-paper-monitor/updates/a-technical-deep-dive-into-glider
Don’t need such refresh rate, hopefully it can be lowered or even freezed – say I havecschematics, next to my PCB design.
Love the bit at the end :D – I guess I’ll take my chance and wait with not buying it, hope there’s not a deadline added post fact for that ;)
It’s a cool project, really, and I hope they will export handles so Xorg can talk to it. It would be really cool to have this on the side to display documents. I did experiment with a third screen in portrait mode, and it was interesting. Once I can use this thing with my regular machine this is on a wishlist. I don’t have time to tinker with it at the moment, the kids demand ROBOTS! or at least automate the 12V LEGO train with a micro:bit
I’m waiting for prices on eInk displays to come down. They are getting more common now, with even budget supermarkets having decent size ones used as product displays instead of paper.
It shouldn’t be long before 13″ ones are very affordable, or there is a flood of used ones on the market.
E-ink monitors have always been easy on the eyes, but hard on the wallet 😅
If dropping the 75Hz spec would make it cheaper I’d do that – a 2nd e-Ink monitor would be super useful for scrolling datasheets and stuff like that, I doubt anyone really needs to be able to play games on it.
Thing is scrolling datasheets really does want some significant refresh rate – if its got the 1fps (if that) of the traditional full screen refresh cycle you can’t really scroll, the nearest you get is jumping whole pages, and for scrolling text to be legible enough to actually scroll through to the right location, or allow you to zoom in/out to the right level you probably need bare minimum 30 fps.
Not sure how well this e-ink system really will work though – it claims 75hz, but doesn’t sound like it can really do that to the full screen or tell you what the pixel response time is in this article, and the video when they scroll the text does look a little blurred (but that could easily be caused by the process of recording it not the screen itself). I suspect with the wide range of screens supported the complete unit performance is varied, going to have to do some more detailed reading on this though.
Still really cool project, but you do definitely want ‘fast’ refresh if you want to use e-ink as a real monitor.
The solution is not to “scroll”, which is a wasteful artifact behavior that only makes sense on certain modern computerized displays.
PageDown.
If you need to maintain continuity, then go down/up by less than a full page.
Just make sure your program can ‘snap’to the proper pages when needed for alignment.
Even 5hz is overkill for this.
Scrolling a datasheet can be just hitting “PgDn” to flip one entire page / screen at a time, at which point 10Hz or less would be fine.
I would not call either of those solutions scrolling, very much more actually reading the document – as on a big document with large chapters you are now looking at potentially several minutes ‘scrolling’ to actually get to the spot you want, page by page slow refresh style. Actually scrolling you are able to skip through 99% of the stuff around the area you want without really needing to be able to read it as people are good at pattern recognition, so you are not having to wait that second to find out this was the entirely wrong page still…
The only e-ink display I’ve wanted is on the back of a phone to show time/date/notifications. 1Hz would be overkill.
My PC monitor is 30Hz (and I happily game on that) so 75Hz is overkill for a document viewscreen.
30 Hz would be flicker-induced torture! Where did you even find a PC monitor that runs that slow? Are you using a CRT TV? Is your PC a C=64? (Because, if so, and you’re reading and commenting on HaD, that’s very cool!)
Can someone comment and triple check the 75Hz claim ?
My understanding is that the native update rate of EInk displays is 75Hz – as in the fastest a pixel can respond is 75Hz (based on the pixel clock). Flipping the timing around, that is a frame every 13ms.
Within the EInk space you need to consider that it takes more than 1 frame to actually move the black and white pigments around without really bad ghosting. So it’s not the same as saying an LCD monitor has 75Hz.
We were at Supercon 2024 and gave a talk – Making E-ink go fast, I’d recommend checking it out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okjJURIejIY
Sorry, what is “noone”?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/noone#English
Maybe I’m out of date on this but last I checked E-INK pixels wear out. If you say a pixel is good for 10M flips, then at 75FPS you could be at wear out in 2.2k hours or at 12 hours/day about half a year. Tell me I’m missing something?
Everything wears out, but so far I don’t think anybody has really worn out e-ink pixels through use alone, usually seems to be the sort of the places you end up using them – like outdoors so under intensive UV that gets them first.
The web seems to think 90 million screen refreshes ~2 seconds each which would suggest its cycling the full screen white-black-white-image or something similar for actually more like 3-4x that 90M in pixel cycles.
From a tech standpoint I can’t really see how flipping the pixels will really degrade them over time, the black particle is still black, will still naturally want to rest at the same charge it had when new as the material isn’t being altered by being moved around, even if the movements worn out the membranes and let the particles float a bit more than intended the pixels are still going to want to be generated when the charges are applied to the electrodes, maybe the cycle time would have to be slowed a bit but they would still want to get to the right places, and maybe the ‘eternal’ image retention would be lost. But if you are using it as a monitor you are not going to notice that at all.
Whoops forgot a factor of 60. A busy live video at 75 FPS seems like it would hit 10M pixel flips in roughly 37 hours. Sure, scrolling datasheets is less abusive, but tell me I’m wrong about wearing the panel out very quickly compared to an lcd?
All of these displays are made by one company – they have the patent. The reason nobody drives them at 75 Hz is that they break if you do this. Some have tried, and failed. Most products with a high framerate add specific warnings and disclaimers that if you, for example, watch youtube on the device – it will break. I got an android tablet with one (I think the only one on the market?), IIRC it came with a big warning printed and at first boot about not stressing the refresh rate. It also does not refresh the screen full unless you swipe up to manually refresh it, presumably to prolong its working life.
Exactly this. You cannot operate e-ink displays at this high of a refresh rate.
Disappointing to see how patents slow world progress down. Now we’ll have to wait another ~10 years for the colour einks to lapse.