Zerowriter Ink is an e-paper word processor with a low-profile mechanical keyboard, brilliant readability, and marathon-ready battery life. This is an exciting new collaboration between Zerowriter and Soldered Electronics, makers of the Inkplate series of e-paper displays. We aim to build an active, robust community around this product, and we hope you’ll be a part of it!
The Zerowriter Project started with a Raspberry Pi Zero, a cheap e-paper panel, and a dream. The mission: make an open source alternative to the classic Alphasmart Neo word processor from the 2000’s. Since then, hundreds of people have gotten involved with our open source project: contributing code, sharing designs, learning, and making.
Zerowriter Ink takes that spirit and pushes things further. Instead of a Raspberry Pi, it’s built around the truly remarkable Inkplate 5. And Zerowriter Ink is available fully assembled.
This is the first of many concepts and designs, and we think you are going to love it.
We designed Zerowriter Ink to be a dependable and expandable alternative to our favorite products like the Alphasmart Neo and the Pomera DM30. It’s for writers first and device hackers second. It’s for anyone who wants a simple, dedicated writing tool. It’s for working at home, on the road, in the park, or at the beach. It ships with easy-to-use software. And it just works, right out of the box.
If you like to tinker, you can dive right in and make it yours. If you don’t, it’ll help you get those words out, and then stay the hell out of your way.
Open source makes sense for projects like this. We are a (very) small team building a simple device, but we are also serving an international community. We can’t support every language, keyboard layout, cloud service, or software request out of the box. Instead, we are going to offer the basic tool with all of the core functionality you expect. Other owners and developers can extend our software and hardware to do much more.
Zerowriter runs on ESP32, and is written entirely in Arduino. It’s one of the easiest languages to learn and work with for hardware projects. Our goal is to keep things extremely approachable. By the time Zerowriter Ink ships to backers, we will publish the code base on GitHub and release our hardware design files.
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"Working on the 5.2-inch eInk screen is... a joy with its 1280 x 720 widescreen resolution."
"Zerowriter Ink is an innovative E-Ink typewriter that combines retro typewriter style with modern technology"
"Sure, you could use a laptop computer for writing on the go, but this device won’t distract you with videos, social media, or websites – it’s first and foremost a mobile writing machine that starts up instantly and offers long battery life."