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!

Zerowriter Inked Up

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.

An Open Typewriter For Writers

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.

Features & Specifications

• Second-edition Inkplate 5 with an upgraded 1280x720 widescreen resolution for crisp, clean text
• Best-in-class e-paper refresh rate means (basically) no lag while writing
• Standard, hot-swappable 60% mechanical keyboard with low-profile switches and keycaps
• Instant-on, distraction-free writing software. No fiddling with accounts or sign-ups. Save and manage your files to MicroSD card
• Optional session tools to count words, track total writing time, set goals, hit milestones, and more
• A week of daily use or a month of standby on a single charge. Built-in, user-replaceable 5000 mAh LiPo battery with USB Type-C charging
• Easy-to-hack, Arduino-based software with full access so you can make it do whatever you want. (Distraction-free Doom, anyone?)
• No gimmicks, no marketing babble, no renders, and no mockups: what you see is a working prototype, and what ships to you will be even better.

Open Source

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.

Interested in This Project?

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