I’m in the market for a repairable FOSS e-ink tablet, as my pocketbook’s touchscreen has died, and it’s a glued together piece of trash. The manufacturer charges 2/3 of the price of a new one for the repair.
Got products or manufacturers?
remarkable is built on linux and lets you ssh into it and do shit… and there’s some open source alternative gui stuff, but it’s not completely foss as far as i know… and mine stopped working with the pen and there’s no way to really repair it… but it’s something.
also when the pen does work, it works really nice.
….
oh, also they’re norwegianYeah, the only truly open source option out there is the PineNote, which is very much non-European. In terms of repairability I expect it would score (relatively) highly though, being designed to be tinkerer-friendly.
OLPC (one-laptop-per-child) is a FOSS e-ink laptop (but small enough to function as an e-reader). Though I think they are no longer made and they were always hard to get.
Do you have a source? According to Wikipedia OLPC shut down in 2014. I found some old reporting about a spin-off, but couldn’t make sense of it.
I’m not sure what you want a source for. You mean a vendor who will sell one? XO-4 Touch was apparently the last model. I just had a look at laptop.org and the site looks useless now. It used to be full of wikis with copious details about the hardware and software of the OLPC.
There are (or were) a variety of NGOs who worked on getting OLPCs into impoverished schools. One of them was https://unleashkids.org/. They are not in the business of selling them but ~15 yrs ago they were kind enough to sell some. The idea was that teachers and developers would need them to help support the OLPC project. I suggest touching base with them and see what they say, since they seem to still be around.
The XO-4 Touch came with “Sugar”, a foss OS just for kids. It was easy to make it boot into Gnome instead (underpinned by RedHat). And someone made an Android OS that could be flashed onto an SD card and booted in the OLPC. I should mention that the OLPC was never 100% FOSS. The usual shit-show of blobs for some of the hardware drivers. I mainly just used it as an e-reader on Gnome.
I’ve always been baffled that these FOSS e-ink laptops did not make it onto the general marketplace, while at the same time there were no commercial makers of anything like it. There was a “Pixel QI” dual-mode screen that could be bought bare and installed in Thinkpads and other machines, but for some reason that never took off either.
I misunderstood and thought you talked about a newer product than the original OLPC, which I was unaware had a transflective display. That’s cool, I’d love to see it in practice. The device is pretty ancient by now though, and as you said hard to come by.
E-ink generally refers to electronic paper displays, which is different from (and much more expensive than) transflective LCDs. So I was confused by the prospect of OLPC having it, especially as the technology barely existed for consumer hardware back when these laptops were made.
My favourite anecdote about the OLPC was how the antennas enabled farmers to communicate locally, and basically unionizing against exploitative practices by the assholes who were buying their crops. It was a really cool project.
Looking for the same thing. I have one I love right now, but it will die and I will never buy a non self repairable ereader again.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/diptyx/diptyx-e-reader
This is the best one I could find, but I think the dual screen design choice is plain wrong. I also like my screens a bit bigger and higher resolution, but on those issues I could be nudged. Not the dual screen design though. Although having options like these will pave the road for our next options :). Good luck with the diptyx, Martijn, (and you on your search for your next ereader)
If you have a 3d printer to make a case, seed studio released a 7" color e-ink terminal with a built in esp32. Even friendlier is the Pimoroni Inky frame with a built in raspberry pi.
Both around $100 USD.
The seedstudio is absolutely shit for frequent updates of the content,though, as it refreshes the whole screen everytime and is slow as hell. Send mine back after a lengthy exchange with the support.
If I see it correctly, they both don’t have any touch or stylus capabilities or did i miss something?
You’re correct. I have one and use it as a weather display but it’s not comparable to a tablet.
I also have one, and the display refresh isn’t exactly quick. It’s probably very normal for colour e-ink displays, but it’s the first I’ve had / experienced. Though it’s fine for a home status display, it would be horrible as a custom e-reader.
I’ve been happy with my Supernote. It’s built to be serviceable, and the battery especially is easy to access and replace. They hope to get Linux working on it at some point, too.
I’ll second that I’ve been quite happy with my supernote, but it doesn’t exactly match the criteria. I also haven’t had to repair any part of it, so I have no experience what the process is like, they are a smaller company and might have parts sourcing issues
