Kernel_Unico Alternatives

Kernel_Unico reviews and mentions

• Challenges Building an Open-Source E Ink Laptop
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Apr 2021

  > They've figured out all the difficult stuff about e-ink

  They meaning Remarkable? If so, then that's marketing-speak. The simple truth is that Remarkable's products all use NXP (formerly Freescale) controllers. The Remarkable2 uses i.mx7D. That has a built-in hardware EPDC. You can google it. The driver is open source. https://github.com/UDOOboard/Kernel_Unico/blob/master/driver...

  That's what does all the "difficult stuff". Not Remarkable.

  > did you know that to flip pixels, e-ink displays require annoyingly proprietary lookup tables of waveforms that can be up to 5-dimensional?

  Yes. But you realize tables are each panel specific. Meaning every single panel you see requires a custom waveform. Nowadays they (E Ink and their partners)'re getting better and have some increased level of consistency so some waveforms can achieve the same result on whole batches of panels. But you'll still see it being batch specific. Take a waveform for one batch and try to use it on another and you'll get lousy ghosty results or maybe even damage the panel permanently.

  > and worked with E-ink directly to implement said waveform table, very low-latency partial updates, and other e-ink "secrets" that could very well be worked out via reverse engineering but are otherwise under NDA.

  That's more marketing speak. If you look at their code which they published, https://github.com/remarkable , it is just minor patches to NXP's driver. All the hard work was done by NXP.