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Are there any demos using eink screens or electronic book readers specifically? A quick search gave me nothing in that regard, but maybe it was way too quick.

Thanks in advance for enlightening an ignorant newbie!

quick search https://demozoo.org/productions/266529/ there is this custom hardware one. i think i recall something for the kindle or the kobo being done before but cant find it atm.

the refresh rate of those kind of devices/screens is typically very low to save battery i guess, not very appealing to do realtime visuals for.

depends. even my fuck old kobo reader has a drawing app... probably uses some blitter/scissor-like tricks to just update pixels along the vector path what you're drawing rather than a full-screen redraw... (the later will probably damage your e-ink display pretty fast)

Never got around making a proper demo before our company ran out of money, but this is about as far as I got

Wow, I saw the video and it's amazing how you coded snake on a tablet like that XD

Anyway, it's pretty easy/hard depending on what E-ink/electronic book readers we are talking about. Some like the Kindle tablets can be hard to code a demo on to (and its going to be black and white) or in general it can be easy IF you are coding for a book reader (usually has a rgb screen) and some other stuff. And you must figure out the API, so that's why we stick to Android, and not E-ink tablets and- you know. Not going to repeat myself, of course.

The other day I saw a few interesting techniques for making fast-refresh eInk stuff, by a 'Wenting Channel'.

Infamous Bad Apple but on eInk and in 60fps, dated 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XduK7wn9SE4

60fps eInk monitor project with frontlight and everything (the 'Modos Flow', for around 700 buckaroos): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHbA2-_qzH4

GameBoy emulation on a recently released M5STACK eInk unit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPbOK90aJEo

or get your hands dirty and go bare metal

An e-ink Kindle device is the total opposite of a Vectrex system in terms of demoscene prods: one is designed to work best with static displays whilst the other has to draw on the screen as rapidly and as widely as possible to prevent phosphor burn-in. It'd be interesting to see the prods for those.

That means the first project should be a Minestorm port :)

Yeah the e-ink device in my video was refreshing as fast as the hardware could. The driver chip could do 8 refresh regions simultaneously (poking registers directly) and the waveforms were opaque binary blobs and definitely pretty conservative.

But of course the display itself is just a tft matrix, and with better hardware the refresh could have been much faster already in 2011. The challenge is that the pixels are physically heavy units so to "turn" them, one needs stronger electric fields and they also have inertia and temperature is a factor too.

From a physics standpoint alone, that sounds fascinating!

that's why screens flash on e-readers. pixels need to be driven between extremes to "calibrate" them to a known state. then it's possible to carefully move them into even some middle states produce grayscales. you have the screen's ideal state in memory and that can be then used to drive pixels even between the middle states. but of course the pixels don't always behave ideally, and hence you need to reset every once in a while.

similar method is used with LCD panels too. to easily verify it. flash two images every frame, and the ideal state might drift apart from the real state of liquid crystals and you get flashing after images on screen.

I like those greyscale ghost silhouettes! That could probably be leveraged in a demo in some way, in a fashion similar to sand garden art.

i would gladly fux0r with the fw of my kindle to get some sort of demo running on it.

E-ink screens are fun.

Finally Tomy Caveman properly.