E-paper displays are prized for their readability and low power use, but they’ve long been dismissed as too slow for everyday computing.
Modos, a two-person startup with open-hardware roots, thinks it has cracked part of that problem with a development kit capable of driving an e-paper display at refresh rates up to a record 75 hertz.
The Modos Paper Monitor and Dev Kit, now available for crowdfunding on Crowd Supply, combines standard e-paper panels with an open source FPGA-based display controller. While the kit provides enthusiasts and developers a complete package (with e-paper display, display driver, and hardware adapter), it’s also an entry point for experimenting with different e-paper displays.
RELATED: How E Ink Developed Full-Color E-paper
“I would say instead of our secret sauce, we have open sauce,” says cofounder Alexander Soto. “You don’t even need to use the panel we’re offering. You could use a different panel and still get [75 Hz].”
E-paper at 75 Hz
Most e-paper panels update at a refresh rate of around 10 Hz or less. (E-paper is the generic term for screens that mimic the appearance of ink on paper—the most well-known brand being that made by the company E Ink.) Some displays don’t even quote a refresh rate and may require up to a full second to refresh.
A better refresh rate means a display can show more frames each second, which in turn provides smoother, more lifelike motion. Modern digital video is usually delivered at 30 or 60 frames per second, which until recently was well beyond the reach of an e-paper display. This is an area where e-paper clearly lags LCD displays, which start at 60 Hz and go up from there.
Modos is able to hit refresh rates of up to 75 Hz on a 13-inch e-paper panel with a 1,600 by 1,200 resolution. (a 6-inch e-paper panel with 1,448 by 1,072 resolution and the same refresh rate is available, too.) Bumping the refresh rate also reduces latency. That’s a key point, as it allows an e-paper display to be used in situations where latency matters, such as a computer or tablet display.
“A lot of people default to thinking that with e-readers or e-paper, it’s slow, it’s going to be flashing all the time,” says Soto. “Our challenge has been going to conferences, going to events, and showing people…e-paper can be very fast.”
Open Source E-Paper Display Controller
Modos’s quoted 75-Hz refresh rate is the highest yet for an e-paper display, but it’s arguably not the key innovation. Several competitors already offer e-paper displays with refresh rates up to 60 Hz which, though lower, is close.
But Modos has a not-so-secret weapon: Caster, an open-source e-paper display controller that’s compatible with a wide variety of e-paper panels. The display controller, which is based on the AMD Spartan-6 FPGA, departs from typical e-paper controllers with pixel-level display management.
“Traditionally, the [e-paper display] controller used a single-state machine to control the entire panel, with only two states: static and updating,” says Modos cofounder Wenting Zhang. “Caster treats each pixel individually rather than as a whole panel, which allows localized control on the pixels.”
The FPGA display controller is paired with Modos’s Glider Mega Adapter, which includes four different display connectors compatible with several dozen e-paper displays ranging in size from 4.3 to 13 inches. Soto says the adapter can be used to repurpose displays salvaged from older e-readers, like Amazon’s Kindle.
A 75-Hz refresh rate allows for smoother scrolling. Modos
Modos also provides an application programming interface (API), written in the C programming language, that lets applications select display-driving modes dynamically. As the video above shows, a Linux window manager can be used to render text in a low-latency binary color mode, display maps in more detailed yet responsive gray scale, and display video with maximum-fidelity gray scale—all simultaneously on the same screen.
The code and schematics for Caster, Glider, and the API are open source and available on Github.
Crowdfunding for E-paper Innovation
Modos’s crowdfunding campaign is set to conclude on 18 September. Orders are expected to ship in January of 2026, although (as is often the case for crowdfunded projects) the shipping window is not guaranteed.
Getting to this stage has taken several years. The company’s founders initially hoped to build an e-paper laptop, the Modos Paper Laptop, which was announced in January of 2022. However, the realities of electronics manufacturing complicated that project early in its life and the laptop was never made available to order.
“Part of it was that the primary aspect ratio for the majority of [laptop] chassises are for 16:9 and 16:10. And when you look at e-paper displays, it was an aspect ratio of 4:3. So, we either had to make a custom chassis, or a custom panel, both of them being prohibitively expensive,” says Soto.
Panel sourcing also remains a hurdle. E-paper’s production is geared toward e-readers and signage, which means most panels aren’t the right size for a computer. However, the Modos Paper Monitor and Dev Kit found a practical compromise in recently introduced 13-inch e-paper displays, many of which provide a resolution similar to LCD and OLED panels developed for laptops.
In this way, the Dev Kit is a continuation of Modos’s original goal. While building a full-fledged e-paper laptop was impractical, the Dev Kit’s high refresh rate, open-source display controller, and API give ambitious users the opportunity to implement their own low-latency e-paper computer display—or anything else they put their mind to.
This article was updated on 8 September 2025 to replace mentions of “E Ink” (the specific e-paper technology developed by the company of the same name) with “e-paper.”