How to Hack the Esquire E-ink Cover
See the innards that power Esquire magazine’s new E-ink cover. Six cell batteries and a few ICs are all that power the two screens. It appears the screens are actually displaying color but they indeed aren’t. They simply alter the contrast of black and white segments behind a translucent image. View the video and check out more details. Also, learn how to hack it using the Arduino.
September 25th, 2008
So, yeah…um you can’t actually make it say anything besides combinations of the words “THE 21ST CENTURY” “BEGINS” and “NOW”. That, and you can turn on and off some squares and rectangles. Let me clarify–there are no pixels. There are sectioned off portions of the Epaper that be turned on as a whole or off as a whole. Thus, you can’t create anything other than what you can make using the segmented shapes given to you. Sad, huh?
September 26th, 2008
um… that doesn’t really count as true “epaper” in my book. I have a china town keychain that does the same thing!
September 29th, 2008
No, it really is Epaper in every definition. What you probably mean is that it doesn’t count as a regular display because of it’s lack of a pixelized matrix.
October 5th, 2008
Howdy
Here’s a writeup I did of some source code to hack on the cover, using an Arduino that I wired directly onto the solder pads of the connector, bypassing the onboard chips, and not needing any hardware either. http://antipastohw.blogspot.com/2008/10/hacking-esquire-cover-e-ink-screen-with.html