tinydrm VS Inkplate-6-hardware

A friend & I have a dream of building an E-reader based on the 10" ED097OC4 E-ink display that was built into the Kindle DX and can now be had for around 30€ (old stock?).

Most parts of the stack are conceptually figured out:

A Pine64 SOPINE module (comparable to the Raspi CM, but cheaper), a Linux DRM driver based on tinydrm (https://github.com/notro/tinydrm) or gud (https://github.com/notro/gud/), as panel driver either vroland's ESP32 based EPDiy (https://hackaday.io/project/168193-epdiy-976-e-paper-control...) or a custom FPGA solution.

What's really missing and what I just can't figure out is how to get a touch input layer on there. Because the format is so weird there's just nothing available off the shelf at a fitting size. Cutting them to size doesn't seem feasible (or is it?), perhaps the most DIYable would be an infrared solution (like early kindles have), but on that topic there's a distinct lack of DIY materials.

A button-only navigation would really suck, since even KOReader (the absolute minimum application to run, preferable would be a full Wayland desktop) doesn't seem to be compatible with that.

I figure this is the best place to ask: Does anyone have an idea how this could be solved? Also, would anyone be interested in E-reader kits like that?

They figured out the protocol for Kindle screens and designed a platform around them. The schematics and hardware design are on github as is the Arduino software, so if you want to play around with a screen you already have then that should supply all the info you need.

Hardware design & schematics

See also https://inkplate.io/, which is a Wi-Fi-enabled display made from recycled Kindles (GitHub repo is here: https://github.com/e-radionicacom/Inkplate-6-hardware)

The Inkplate 6 works pretty well - I am using it for my digital picture frame. The only disappointing thing for me is, that they haven't released the actual source files (Eagle, Kicad, etc..) for the hardware yet. [1]

[1] https://github.com/e-radionicacom/Inkplate-6-hardware/issues...