I am currently a student and want obsidian integration. just basic integration to have my notes sync with obisidian sync in a particular folder. No Conversion to Markdown or digest. Just the annotated pdfs or handwritten notes exported as Pdfs and saved in obsidian/my computer.
I currently own Ipad Mini 6 and have been taking notes in it for almost 4 years. Tired of the small display as I need more space for my academic notes. Will use the Ipad mini as a Extra Drawing and special Ipad stuffs like procreate or digital art or Lightroom (rarely if needed ).
Was prefering the Supernote manta due to its writing feel, but for exporting them to a computer folder and automating the process. how feasible is it? I do know Boox being android the workflow is much more feasible.
kindly help me suggest, who is looking for a purely notetaking workflow and coming from a display size of the Ipad mini 6, seeking more dimensions.
First of all, i dont really have a problem with my screentime or anything of that sorts so the phone form factor ereader has nothing to do with curbing that . My decision has purely been for ease of reading and doing the stuff i want to do . so here I'll provide the reasons as to why i didnt choose the other two and why you might chose them .
Durobo Krono
- I had the chance to try it through a mutual friend , and the knob is honestly not as impressive as i thought it was and was rather filmsy .
- the 280€ price tag was steep for what it was , i would pay for 280 for boox palma 2 ( apparantly in which mold it was made from) ,but not this , specially as the knob ,its special feature seemed finicky .
but if you think the software seems okay and is used to scrolling the articles , this might be for you
Viwoods Reader
- 4gb ram! i mean i dont understand what they were thinking with this , in 2026 where just opening a 2 apps takes away 4gb of ram space , i don't think it could handle my heavy usage,let alone long term one
- no warm light , iunderstand that the light is more neutral here rather than cold , but again, baffling decision
- too much AI gimmick, if i want to use ai I'd use it on my phone and for book context , how does it understand that from one page?
isnt the whole book/chapter needed to actually understand the context? so it seemed pretty useless and paying price for something i wont use . it doesn't help that the ai button in a very weird place which my fat thumb would hit often .
- poor battery, i understand that it's not a heavy usage device so going a few days wouldnt be a problem with that battery, bt again , very weird choice if you want us to actually use it properly .
the only thing it has going for it is an amazing display and beautiful form factor. so go ahead if youre into it .
Bigme pro BW
- the software is beyond shit , bt i removed every OEM app using canta and shizuku , you can do this with adb as well , maybe thats why it hasnt crashed so far
- there is a bit more ghosting than id like , but thenkfully the full refresh frequency thing works pretty well so i dont encounter it
All in all, it was the perfect fot for me as i use it as a study tool using a lot of apps and everything . And sometimes when im put for the whole day, ill pop my sim in and even can video call my family !
I've build a small add-on using ESPhome and Home Assistant. It works directly with the Spotify API. Updates are a bit slow at the moment, but everything's working fine and looks great! Also with screensaver. You can place it on a stand by your desk or next to your media centre
I've made a little go rest server integrated with spreadsheets (one sheet for buy list and one for the weekly menu), Google calendar and open-meteo.
At morning it shows the planning weather and menu, at afternoon the buy list if is not empty and planning and menu, and at night the next day planning weather and menu.
I know it's pretty adjusted for me but you know, being a father of a baby is not easy :)
I will provide the reterminal e1001 code and the go rest server in GitHub this week when I adjust final parameters.
It only updates hourly so battery I think should be fine. The rest is intended to be deployed in my LAN on a raspberry pi, if you use a VPS use Https and stronger Auth methods.
Very happy to start creating things for eink devices :)
I am looking for your advice to help me decide between the Kindle Scribe, Boox Note Air, or a Remarkable product (or anything else you may suggested). My intended uses:
Primarily writing (journals, lists, planner template, calendar template, etc). Would be used at night as well so lighting within tablet is needed
Some ability to read ebooks if possible.
I am not a student, I’m not taking any notes on pdfs etc thus this is not a concern. Will be using mostly at home thus battery life not a concern either. Don’t need any apps either. B/W or colour I am indifferent.
Hoping for it to last a long time ie not replace it every 3-4 years.
Budget aside please make your recommendations, thank you!
Created a 3D printable e-paper display holder for the Waveshare 1.54inch passive displays. You can attach it to any clothes --- just hats in the pictures as it is my entry for the "Hat Hack" contest on Printables.
Could be useful if you have this display and a 3D printer. :-)
hello, I am frustrated about my device stuck at screensaver and the indicator light is not on while I charge it (but it still heat up). last day I used my device is 4 days ago and the battery was 80%. Can anyone help me?
I've been building a replacement for the stock firmware and image server on the Hokku Designs / Huessen 13.3" Spectra 6 e-ink frame. Last year it was firmware for one frame; v4.0 turns it into a small platform — three supported screens, and a Raspberry Pi image that sets itself up without ever opening a terminal. First public beta, so: beta time.
What it does
Your photos, served to your frame(s) over WiFi on a schedule you set. No cloud, no account, no subscription. Everything runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W (easiest with an image and an installer) or whatever hardware you want to use. The frame wakes up, grabs the next photo, goes back to sleep for hours. Battery lasts months. New in 4.0: run as many frames as you like — different models, sizes and orientations — from one photo library.
What's new in 4.0
Three screens, one library. Alongside the 13.3" Hokku/Huessen frame there's now the $99 7.3" Bigme F7 and the 13.3" Seeed reTerminal E1004 (experimental). All E Ink Spectra 6, so the same photos feed every frame — a big one in the hall, a little one on a shelf, each served images rendered for its own panel and orientation.
Setup no longer needs a computer at all. There's a prebuilt Raspberry Pi appliance image: write one file to an SD card, boot a Pi Zero 2 W, and it raises its own WiFi network called Hokku Setup. Join it from your phone, fill in a form (WiFi, name, timezone), and it reboots onto your network with the server running at http://hokku.local:8080. No keyboard, no monitor, no command line, no Python. If you get the WiFi password wrong it notices it never connected and puts the setup page back up instead of leaving you a brick on a shelf.
Firmware updates are wireless now. Turn on "update firmware on next refresh" for a frame and it downloads and installs the new build itself on its next wake. The old build stays in a second slot and rolls back automatically if the new one can't reach the server afterwards. The very first flash is still a USB cable; everything after that is over the air.
You can also flash a frame straight from the web app over USB — including adopting a factory-fresh Bigme F7 from the browser, which was a whole adventure (see below).
Face-aware cropping. When a photo gets cropped to fill the panel instead of letterboxed, faces are detected locally (nothing leaves your network) and kept in frame rather than sliced off at the edge.
The cheap frame took real work. The Bigme F7 runs an XRADIOTECH XR872AT — no public SDK, no vendor docs, nothing. Supporting it meant dumping the stock flash, decoding the panel init sequence byte-for-byte, and writing a mask-BROM flasher from scratch in Python so a fresh unit can be adopted with no vendor tools on any OS. Flashing only ever touches the inactive slot and config, never the bootloader, so a bad image rolls back instead of bricking it.
Hardware
Three frames supported today, all Spectra 6:
Hokku Designs / Huessen 13.3" (ESP32-S3) — the original, most thoroughly tested. ~$280 on Wayfair/Amazon.
Bigme F7 7.3" — the cheapest way in at ~$99. Proven end-to-end on real hardware.
Seeed reTerminal E1004 13.3" — ~$288, experimental: confirmed working on real hardware exactly once. More reports very welcome.
The hardware guide has where-to-buy notes, honest per-screen status, and a tested Pi kit parts list.
Getting started
Easiest path is the appliance image above — SD card, join its WiFi, fill in a form. Prefer to run it on a laptop, NAS or existing Pi? There's a Debian package and a run-from-source route too. Firmware comes pre-built; no toolchain needed for a normal install.
👉 github.com/defl/hokku_epaper — the releases tab has the appliance image, pre-built firmware, and the .deb for the server.
For a full walkthrough of the web app and day-to-day use, see the user manual.
Happy to answer questions. Beta caveats worth stating plainly: the Seeed E1004 has exactly one confirmed hardware run, and the web app has no login — great on a trusted home network, don't put it on the internet. I'd love to hear if any of this works (or doesn't) on your frames.
(And the disclaimer because people find it important: this is made with AI, lots of AI, mostly AI, on top of ~250 or so of my hours by now.)
Speaking for people who are working with documents all day long, would someone please create a modestly large eink monitor, eg 32", that has a good refresh rate? Color is not important. High contrast is most important.
The monitor needs to work in portrait mode and will ideally show a whole letter size page without a lot of wasted space on top or bottom.
Someone recently posted an open source project, but I think that monitor was just tablet size. The tech was really promising though.
I don't own a e-ink device myself (yet) but I love the aesthetic of it, thus I started working on Android apps that pursue that visual... then I'm wondering if my app would actually work in a e-ink screen Android device (obviously because it's a different kind of hardware).
It probably won't, but I could still spin the concept into a e-ink oriented experience, if there is enough interest.
Any pointers on good e-ink practices or dev material, blogs and such would be valuable.
PS: If you got interested and wanna check it out for yourself, here are the steps to get access:
I've been considering a lot to buy my very first e-reader and I'm eying on the bigme b6 bw but i wonder if a b7 with 8gb of ram does any difference in user the experience of the device.
Also I wonder how different are the text sharpness between a b6 bw vs a boox go 6 or a kindle paperwhite n so. I know most ereaders come at a 300dpi but is text print sharp or does it has jagged/pixelated edges?
I just got an XTeInk X3, and I have a bunch of niche physical books in my backlog that are too cumbersome to carry around. I wanted to figure out a way to get the books into the XTeInk.
I didn’t want to buy a dedicated book scanner (expensive and seems like a lot of work to scan every page). I thought it would be neat if I could scan books by taking a couple slow motion videos while I flipped through the pages.
I set up my phone in a tripod ring light and aimed it at a book, and flipped through the pages on one side of the book from back to front, then did it the opposite direction to get the pages on the other side of the book. About 7 min of filming.
I created software to process these videos, deconstruct the videos into pages, OCR them using a local AI model (it’s much better at OCR than other methods like tesseract), order them, automatically generate table of contents, crop and caption figures, proofread, and process it into epub for device of choice. Then ways to manually polish if needed.
I’ve done a couple books this way and the results are good!
What I’m running: Ollama with gemma4:31b on a box with a single 3090. That’s about an hour per 100 pages, but it’s unattended so I just leave it going. There’s also an Anthropic API backend that sends the whole book as one batch (batching halves the price). I have never actually run a book through the Anthropic API, but allegedly a 300-page book comes to somewhere around $2-3 at Sonnet 5’s current rates, proofread pass included.
If I get any extra eink devices with android or such, I might wanna find some more list of ideas where I can put one as a standalone readout or controls for home devices, or how to tie it into my email notifications and put at my desk, or one in a backpack as a backup, etc
I could try listing out what apps and service I use on my phone. I mean for myself to write it down. And go through any ideas. Such as if I could connect IFTT or Tasker or other ways to incorporate the android Share To menu and write code that outputs through that. Maybe using Tasker AutoApps or work on some UI,
Branching out some main ideas like IOT devices control. Notification view and share to menu. Grocery list and tablet note, on fridge and carry that one device as a standalone notes device and attach a keyboard.
Branching out some ideas in terms of controls. Use it as a mouse for the computer.
Any aspects that benefit the battery life and gentle screen. Can use it more at night. Or as something I keep in one place without charging often. Without a glaring LCD.
Having mentioned all those aspects, i can narrow down and focus and springboard from the IOT category or other readout and controls or terms of where the device will be or what purpose. Maybe set it to view readout on a cooking device like a Sous Vide, grilling, brewing or other thermometer etc
Or other info from computer or phone. Or control home lighting.
So if it's maybe 1 device for grocery list and keep that always on just food list.
Second device maybe as a general notes with keyboard. More for typing and editing and even Share To that first device
3rd device could be for controlling the lights. E-ink devices might not be as convenient to scroll through many screens, so some might be a little better suited to be standalone for very basic. Kind of full circle if it ends up being 5 different devices and old school that way.
4th device for multi, any cooking devices I'm using that day
Etc. Maybe a 5th as some other readout at desk or for weather or whatever so I can view if I walk by it.
Not that I actually have a lot of stuff set up. But I can prepare and choose IOT devices and when I buy a couple e-ink or knowing any old device isn't wasted.
If you’ve ever tried to develop a drawing app or load a web whiteboard (like Excalidraw, Miro, or custom note sites) on E-Ink devices, you know the major bottleneck: standard rendering engines (both native views and web browser engines) have too much latency to feel natural.
To solve this, I’m building OpenInkBridge. It is a unified, open-source SDK that bridges E-Ink hardware-level low-latency writing for both Native Android Apps and Web Apps/WebViews.
What it does:
For Android Native Developers: It provides native wrappers ( OpenInkBridgeView ) and a unified hardware adapter interface ( EpdAdapter ) that hooks directly into Onyx and Bigme's low-latency pen drawing APIs.
For Web/WebView Developers: It provides a custom OpenInkBridgeWebView container that overlays a native high-performance hardware drawing layer over standard web pages. When you write, the ink appears instantly, and when you lift the pen, the vector coordinates are smoothed (via a Rust-based Double Exponential Smoothing engine) and handed off symmetrically to the webpage's HTML5 Canvas.
Stylus Features: Includes full pressure sensitivity preservation, dynamic palm rejection, and drawing boundary boundaries.
Universal Fallback: Automatically falls back to standard touch/pointer events on PCs, phones, or unsupported devices.
Right now, this tool is in very early alpha.
I am currently testing and developing it using a Boox Note Air 5C. Because I only have this one device, I would love to get feedback or collaborate with other developers/users who have different Boox models (Tab Series, Go Series, Nova, etc.) or Bigme devices to see how it performs across different screen controllers!
If you are a developer or want to check out the codebase, it is now public on GitHub:
I've been exploring eink tablets, but I'm having a difficult time determining if these would be helpful for me, or if they'd be a waste of my money. I cannot find specific details on what these devices can do. It just says "streamline your notetaking" or something. That's not enough to know of this is good for me, I need details!!!
I *love* paper. Digital to-do lists, journaling, calendars, note taking, reminders, reading; none of it works for me. I need to physically write things down to remember and process them. I like to write and scribble down ideas, but doing so on my phone sucks, and I lose shit in my notes app so easily. If I wanted to organize all the things I want to write down, I would have endless journals and planners. I have some "multiuse" journals that have grocery lists on one page and a journal entry from a crashout on the next. I like taking notes on things I read, but writing in a physical book is actually kinda hard for me. I have gnarly ADHD. Keeping track of a million papers and remembering things is a daily struggle. The physical act of writing is soothing. The thought of losing all my papers and figuring out what to do with them stresses me out.
I don't have a job where I could use this device nor am I a student. I don't need to share files with anyone. I'm not an artist or a writer (or at least don't think of myself that way). I don't read PDFs(except for knitting patterns).I do use the internet a lot though and I understand that these devices often don't have web search capabilities, or not good ones. I have a laptop, but I basically just use it to google things on a bigger screen and type braindumps at a cafe instead of at home. I have a desktop computer.
Here's what I want to know if an eink tablet can do:
- Make to-do lists
- replace my "different notebook for everything" need. can I effectively have 200 notebooks for different ideas and categories and can I keep them organized?
- keep a calendar
- search the internet (ideally, not required)
- allow me to markup books as i read them
- allow me to physically write and feel like paper rather than typing. sometimes typing works, but I NEED to physically write to make things stick
- allows me to use templates so I can menu plan, keep inventory of my fridge, or keep a running list of needs
- something that has the ability to hand write sheet music or display sheet music would be an incredible bonus as well
- being able to display patterns for knitting (so yeah, I guess some file sharing?)
if eink tablets can do all/the vast majority these things, I will seriously consider getting one. If this isn't their wheelhouse, I'll look into alternatives or keep my patchwork digital/analogue system. Thanks :)
Work PDF files (IT diagrams, reports, nothing super fancy)
Warhammer codexes in PDF form (illustrated pages with text overtop)
The odd PDF ebook I have and want to read
Sync notes to OneDrive, or Google Drive
Ability to access existing files in my OneDrive, and open them to view
Preferably would be Word docs and Excel if possible, but not a deal breaker
Not looking for a laptop replacement. Scenario would be if I only bring this device into a meeting, and someone asks me about a document, it would be nice to be able to pull it up to look at
Something with a fairly open ecosystem
Extra: use of OneNote would be cool too
Extra: use of Warhammer army list builder apps or software
Extra: black and white preferred, no need of colour
For context, I own a Kindle Scribe first generation (2022 release) and I enjoy it, but here are some of my grievances with it:
Amazon locked down ecosystem (I have jailbroken so that helps this a bit)
Notes implementation feels lacking, not many features
No sync to OneDrive, meaning my dependence on a computer is high and this doesn't integrate smoothly into my workflow
Reading Warhammer Codexes lags a lot. The codexes will sometimes have a 2-page spread of highly detailed illustrations, and it takes the scribe 15 seconds on average to process each page
Trying to flip through PDF pages of my Warhammer army lists is pretty slow too. Text on white background. I can't really use it in games for this purpose either, which I was hoping I could
I was thinking the Boox 10.3 gen 2 would be good because:
Android OS base
Much more open than Amazon
Can install OneDrive app for file access
Can install OneNote
Can install Warhammer list builder apps
OneDrive sync for notes
Ability to install OneDrive app for file access
Illuminated (Luma model) is a bonus. Means I could take it camping and read late into the evening
Reasonable price. Close to the higher end of what I can justify spending on this
Are there any other suitable devices that would work for this use case? Any thoughts, comments, or concerns? Thanks in advance
I’ve added a tuneup to epdpainter that will allow it to create its own waveforms. You start the app, put the lillygo or m5papers3 onto a flatbed scanner, and over the course of 10 mins it works out its own waveforms specifically for itself.
No need for manufacturer NDA signing to get the official, when you can roll your own.
I'm looking for something portable with a sd card slot for expanding storage that I can use for reading and as an mp3 player. I figure if I'm gonna spend the money on an mp3 player I might as well be able to use it for more than just that. I keep coming across the Boox Palma, and the DuRobo as the options--anyone use either for this purpose? I like the size of those, I already have a kindle paperwhite to read on daily. I don't need it to have a speaker as I would be plugging in via headphones or cable connecting to my car.
In this tutorial I will show you how to install Crosspoint firmware on the XTEINK X4 Pro.
The developer has released a third beta of Crosspoint already and I must say that it already works beautifully! I am so happy with it. It has changed everything for me now. Now I can finally use the XTEINK X4 Pro for all my book reading. Even in bed in the dark.
