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Bad Apple on an E-ink E paper display (2022)

Wenting ChannelCited 4× on HN, 2022–2025
YouTube
demo · general · 2022–2025 on HN

A demo of the Bad Apple music video played back at 60 FPS on an e-ink display, up from 2.4 FPS in an earlier attempt. It is part of the effort behind the open source Modos e-ink monitor.

HN cites it as the demonstration that e-ink can do low-latency, video-rate refresh with an open hardware controller.

4 comments from Hacker News

@dvdkon2025-08 · in “My phone is an ereader now”

I feel like e-ink displays/EPDs are widely used, but underexplored, by major manufacturers at least. The person behind the Modos project already linked by someone else has put a lot of effort into pushing EPDs to their limits and put together the best technical documentation for EPDs that I know of: link EDIT: Here's an older demo of theirs: ▶ this video

@ploek2024-05 · in “Glider – open-source eInk monitor with an emphasis on low latency”

They have a video where they have an eInk display show video at 60 Hz. In contrast to a previous video, where the display was running at 2.4 Hz and the video then sped up by 10x, this is not sped up. What kind of black magic is this? ▶ this video

@Hamcha2023-10 · in “Eye comfort a priority for all-in-one desktop PC with color E Ink display”

I'm skeptical not of the claims but of the usability long-term, tablets like the BOOX Tab Ultra C look great but they commit to violating the GPL rather than giving users a chance to mess with the internals. I've been loosely following the works of Wenting Zhang and their modos.tech which have a fully open hardware controller that can run at 60FPS[1] with 1bit BW and still seem pretty decent latency-wise with grayscale on[2]. Sadly most of their public activity nowadays seem to be on building a DIY MILC camera so don't know if we're ever going to see a full version of this. 1. ▶ this video 2. link

@Toadtoad2022-06 · in “The Modos Paper Monitor”

Demo of the music video "Bad Apple" being played on this monitor (or at least an iteration of it): ▶ this video