Hi everyone, I’m new to the forum and I’m Italian.
I have been following e-ink technology for a few months and I was very impressed by the new 7 color e-ink version.
I would like to create a maxi display of over 200", also placing several 24"-32" e-ink displays side by side.
Unfortunately, these are very expensive, but I think this depends on why they are made from TFT matrices of existing current displays, which have a very high resolution, even 4K.
For my project, given the enormous dimensions, a resolution of the order of 20-30 dpi would be sufficient instead of the current 140 pixels per inch.
Unfortunately it seems that e-ink has no interest in making this type of low resolution panel.
However, I think this type of low resolution display is very interesting, because e-paper technology can gain a foothold especially in large-scale street advertising, as generally a static image or one that changes a few times in a day is sufficient and especially where it is not possible. bring electricity as currently available for LED signs.
E-ink technology will never catch on in PC displays etc. until the refresh time for composing the image drops below 1/10 sec. compared to the current 10-15 sec. necessary to compose the image.
In the meantime, can you give me instructions on how to move and how to manage multiple displays side by side.
Hey @Mauro281025, welcome to the forums!
Cool to hear your interest in E-Ink, they’re great displays! I’m a big fan myself as well!
Just hoping to get some clarification on your project, I am assuming you want to use these displays for your advertising/billboard idea? It is more difficult than you would think to run a lot of displays simultaneously, but should be doable. There are two options that come to mind initially.
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Use some sort of SPI/I2C Bus to address many different displays one after the other. Think of how a standard display works, row-by-row, pixel-by-pixel, but imagine you do it for each display in the matrix.
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Use a microcontroller such as a RPi Pico (which are fairly cheap, at least compared to the E-Ink displays) with each display. They each communicate with each other, or with a main mini-computer board/PC, to synchronise display.
It may be possible to use a combination of these two, or another option entirely, just some ideas I had. Regardless, in any scenario you will likely run into issue with synchronisation, refresh rate, power consumption, etc. as this is quite a big project.
Good luck with it! Looking forward to seeing your next steps.
Hi Zach,
nice to hear from you so soon with your reply.
Apart from finding 32-40" e-ink color displays at a modest price, I don’t know if this depends on the fact that they are made on TFT matrices of high resolution monitors, but in my project I don’t need all that resolution. I was thinking of a much simpler solution.
Since the giant image to be represented is static and not dynamic and will be changed about 10-20 times in a day, I was thinking about loading a small part of the image on each single panel as if this were a puzzle.
This should be much easier to manage, what do you think?
Furthermore, the current consumption doesn’t worry me much as e-ink displays only need a few hundred Watts but only for less than a minute to compose the image.
So it’s just a matter of understanding whether producing very low resolution e-ink displays can drastically reduce their price or whether the latter is influenced by other factors unknown to me.
Also I don’t think e-ink corporation sees this product solution as a future business?
Hi Mauro,
ePaper or eInk is a different technology to TFT, where the cost lies is probably in the techniques used.
TFT would be done at a much larger scale, whereas Eink isn’t, not so much the DPI.
You would likely have to make a custom program in a programmatic image processing package like Pillow for python.
You could use this to adjust the offsets and other parameters regarding bezzels and other factors.
I’ve seen lots of HUB75 LED matrices used for advertising from a distance, or in Sydney, the bus stops have moved to large LCD like displays. (though the rolling banner displays are arguably cooler)