Happy November! This is my first post-funding project update, and wow — did we ever fund. Zerowriter Ink raised just shy of $100,000 USD. It’s shaping up to be one really cool device. So let’s talk about something really important to me.

E-paper is a fickle thing. Lots of people balk at the concept — high latency, laggy, ghosting, etc. There are other similar products out there that have e-paper screens that suffer from these shortcomings. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The reason Inkplate appealed to me originally was their fast e-paper promising very fast partial updates, alongside some really nice looking panels with great features baked in.

When it came to Zerowriter Ink, we jumped on their new generation panel: Inkplate 5v2. The updated screens operate at a much higher resolution: that means more text on the screen, at a higher clarity.

The downside? Well, it turned out that the higher resolution panels came at a cost: speed. The new panels looked great, but operated at about 200 ms. This was a decent chunk slower than the panel I’d been developing into Zerowriter Ink, and it was much slower than something I wanted to send to all our backers.

Reinforcements

Enter Larry! @bitbank2 is an e-paper specialist who focuses on optimizing code and finding performance. He dove in to the project and quickly built some solutions.

The end result? Zerowriter Ink now operates at about 100 ms — that is roughly twice as fast as the original Inkplate 5v2, and about 50% faster than the lower-resolution Inkplate 5. And there’s potential for even more performance on the horizon.

I’m working on a longer video that illustrates the details behind the screen issue and why it’s so important to me. But the included Youtube video above might give you an idea where things are at.

These kinds of things don’t translate as well to video as they do in-person.

Long story short: e-paper doesn’t have to be slow.

Bigger picture

Ok, aside from me geeking out about e-paper performance, what does that mean for everyone? I mentioned responsiveness and feel — it is worth saying it again. I truly believe that devices like this need to feel as good as they possibly can, because they are tools writers rely on as part of their day-to-day.

You shouldn’t have to settle for less or make compromises. Typing feels better. Scrolling through your files or a document feels better. And feel is key.

Moreso: a lower latency panel opens up a ton of development possibilities. Less time spent on updates is more time the MCU can spend on other tasks. More responsive controls and feedback means things like cursor-based editing and more traditional word-processing features are much more approachable.

Production updates

Things are still moving along and almost every key supplier is ready to begin. It’s been a bit slower than expected, as there are a few snags with finalizing a few deals, but it seems like everything will be resolved in a timely fashion. I am expecting everything to move forward in the coming weeks.

In the mean time, I’ll be working on a more detailed behind-the-scenes video about this post. I’ll share it on my Youtube channel, and on Reddit.