tinydrm VS The-Open-Book

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?

Have you seen the "Open Book" project?

https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book

Open book project https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book

If you want to get all custom, you could build an e-reader https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-pico-powered-open-source-ebook-reader

>I really wish I could have an e-reader, but again, I don't want to spend money on things that will lock me into a single vendor indefinitely and might just arbitrarily go away.

https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book

This may be up your alley.

It's not a commercial off the shelf product, but the Open Book uses a 4.2" screen. There are other devices you can find on places like AliBaba that are kinda small. However, in general you won't find a name brand commercial ereader under 6" that isn't ina phone body. There were a couple at 5" back-when but the industry really settled on 6" as the common base size.

This is very useful to see examples of how people have used APIs that are either poorly documented or not at all. Or even that are well documented, really. Going from docs to code is not always straightforward.

To give you just one example, recently I've been using it to find how people have written code to interface with e-ink displays. I usually have the datasheet which lists all the commands the protocol support, but building it all into a valid startup sequence of ~20 commands to activate the display is left as an exercise for the reader.

So the docs will look like this: https://www.waveshare.com/w/upload/6/6a/4.2inch-e-paper-spec...

And what I need is a sequence like this: https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book/blob/5c5054c58...

There is a link to the project early in the article: https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book