GoKawiilKaitlyn Cimino / Android Authority
TL;DR The Modos Flow is an E-Ink display that is as smooth as a traditional display, because it refreshes at 60Hz.
The company built several custom microcontrollers to ensure it worked as intended.
The displays are now in their crowdfunding stage, with the backer’s package starting at $619 for the monochrome variant.
Electronic paper, commonly known as e-paper, has been around for several decades, but its primary use cases have been limited to devices that are feeble in terms of performance, such as e-readers, or physically small, such as smartwatches. Because of how slowly an e-paper refreshes, it has remained far from use cases that can be described using synonyms of “fast.” However, there’s recently been an attempt to change the status quo by a company named Modos, which has built an e-paper display that runs at 60fps and works with virtually any powerful device.
Six years into building a fast E-Ink display, Modos has introduced its first commercial product, the Modos Flow, which uses a 13.3-inch E-Ink Carta 1300 display panel. To ensure paper-like visuals, the display has a high 3200 x 2400 pixels resolution, leading to a 300fpi. It comes with a USB-C port that supports DisplayPort over USB-C. It’s also portable, so you’re not bound to a wall socket.
Modos
The biggest challenge was getting the display to refresh fast enough for a 60Hz refresh rate (pixels refresh 60 times per second, or once every 16.67ms). During the time troubleshooting for a solution, the team had to create the display pipeline from scratch, basically custom microcontrollers that allow the E-Ink display to run fast enough, and the key was to isolate the FPGA driver (which works as an interface between the computer and the display protocol) onto a separate chip.
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