I can't believe how beautiful that oscilloscope is!

Fascinating. Never realized how these E-paper displays work. Thanks for sharing this thorough video :)

Sorry, what did you say? I was staring at the scope.

I love you please don't go away for this long ever again

I worked for EINK several years ago and the team I worked for mainly focused on creating the waveforms for each transition. Each grey had a waveform and there were also different waveforms for different temperatures. Because any variation in the chemistry or display assembly affected the transitions, each batch of panels required custom waveforms. I'm sure it's more automated today but the number of technician hours involved in making those earlier panels was crazy.

I can't tell you how refreshing it is to see a new video from you. It's like a drink of cold water for my mind. Hope things have been going well!

That scope, WTF! bigger screen than the laptop in the background.

200$ computer and a 20000$ scope

usually when people on youtube make "[something] hacking" videos, it's some clickbait douche presenting cursory google search instructions to change user-editable settings. this guy actually does real, intrepid work and does an extremely thorough job explaining it.

I have been following your channel for a long time and I always thought everything you were doing was way god-level above and beyond the work I do. But low and behold I just watched this video and this was exactly what I was working on! I was working on a 4 level e-ink display but it's very similar. The lookup table format in my controller works differently but close enough to at least be set on the right path. I learned a lot from this video and I am trying to reproduce your findings. I made a lot of breakthroughs inspired by your video. It was basically unusably slow before and now it's much smoother and getting better. Thank you very much!

Whenever it takes months for a new video, I know it’s going to be a good one. Nice work Ben, this is super interesting!

Very cool, Ben - always learn something from your vids. Glad you're enjoying the scope!

I'm getting mixed signals from your oscilloscope ...

Such a cool technology. I love my ebook reader. The one that I have has a refresh sequence where it does minor refreshes every page, and then a longer full-clear refresh every 5 or 6 pages or something. It's also worth noting that the cells containing the charged pigments do not correspond to individual display pixels, but are smaller and more randomly clumped together. The pixels come from the electronic array underneath, and one pixel may activate particles in multiple or partial cells. The cell structure exists to ensure a good distribution of the different particle types across the screen.

Great to see you back again!

"oscilloscope, open the bay door", -"I'm afraid I can't do that Dave"

I've been watching some of the progress on Twitter and I'm glad I got to finally see the video! Can't wait to see what cool projects arise thanks to this intense research and work!

I'm so glad you are back with quality technical content. Don't go away like this again !

Great video and explanation, thank you!!

I liked how this video about E-paper turned into a vid about that oscilloscope

I can't believe that is how the tri colour works. Amazing. I always learn something(often too many things) in your videos.

I can't believe how detailed and clear your explanations and demonstrations were. This was exactly what I needed to understand the limitations I was running into with e-paper. Thank you!

Ben don't make us miss the best channel on youtube again! Also as someone who does C++ programming for living, I do recommend you getting absolutely any kind of proper code editor with syntax highlighting and/or auto formatting. Once you get used to it, it just takes way less time to read code that's properly formatted and displayed. Popular C++ editor choices for windows that are intuitive and work out of the box are: notepad++, sublime, atom, vscode(not visual studio) and many others.

Some really cool stuff! Love the custom code. That stuff usually creates quite a bad ghosting effect but the updates seem entirely clean.

Wow. I've always wondered about these and was so curious about their limitations. Wonderful explanation.

It would be interesting to try a burn-in test with that display without the reverse cycle, e.g. 10 updates at one spot, 20 updates at the next and so on until the text is barely legible. Then apply full black/white cycles to see how long the burn-in takes to clear at each spot (or how much it fades after let's say an hour).

Good video after a long time. Thanks for your work.

Incredible how far technology has come. You explain things really well.

he's Alive!!!!!!!

No doubt about it, you are an impressive dude. I'm always impressed with your vids' content.

That is one impressive scope - your in depth research even moreso.

absolutely iconic and masterful youtuber. such great content.

Wow that scope is incredible

Thanks for the video! I've got a few of these ePaper panels directly from Good Display in China (the manufacturer as far as I can tell).. they were happy to help with questions until I asked for a datasheet describing the LUT bytes, then they became very cagey. Nice work on finding a datasheet that has these details. All of their datasheets seem to be missing information and are bit inconsistent.

I applied to work for E-Ink Corp once. They never got back to me, but I did some reading on their tech while I was waiting. Very cool tech, and this video does a great job of showing it off

I was just starting to investigate eink displays for something I want to bring to market using a color one, Thanks for the great video!

Great research work with very good findings. Thanks for the insights into E-paper technology.

Fascinating.. Don't know which I'm more impressed with, the epaper & your ability to reverse-engineer what's going on, or that borrowed scope! With equipment like that, in the right hands, you could figure out how 90% of stuff ticks. Great video.

Only pure quality coming from this channel!!!!

Stumbling across a science channel I was previously unaware of is always a good start to my day. :D

I stripped down a monitor some time ago and saw a few of those silicon looking bars. I had no idea what it was but postulated it was some silicon device. Thanks for pointing out what it is. Some time ago you noted on a Q&A segment some of the reasons you made videos. A few months ago I watched that video and decided to start up loading content. Reasoning made sense to me.

the Master just release another amazing video ! thanks, it was very instructive

It has been a while since I have seen grooveshark in bookmarks! Great video! Very well explained, keep up your videos :D

wow I have missed you keep up good work this was awesome!

Glad to see you back!

Ben, I admit that I have very little use for e-paper hacks, but still the same, I really appreciate your content. Thank you.

A couple of interesting thoughts after watching this video. Could the display be physically altered if it was hit against something or had a high acceleration? Would the particles be able to move in the fluid just from physical force? Also, there might be a way to speed up the refresh rate in the future by developing a different medium for the particles to float in. Its a very interesting technology.

Really interesting and informative. Thank you for teaching me something new today!

"The industry thrives on secrecy or something." - 14:25

I'm doing my PhD on e-ink and it's a bit of a misconception that e-ink needs no power at all. The major problem with e-ink is the fact that there are charged inverse micelles in the cell, which over time will start to replace the colloidal particles. There's a lot of interesting scientific literature in this field actually!

Perfectly explained ! Thank you.

Very informative, nicely explained. Thanks

That scope is glorious indeed!

Brilliant video! I have almost no experience with e-ink displays, so this really helped me learn how they work and how the controller works. I am planning to make a video about OLED displays, how they work, and include some microscope footage of the SSD1306 chip found in most OLED display modules. SO far I have got some microscope footage of the chip, but not enough to use in my video. The problem I am facing is that even with a bright light shining from the top, the chip is still too dark to see clearly.

WOOOOOOH!!! YEAAAAAAAA!!! :D :D Very glad to have you back!

Very interesting tutorial, now I know how they work, thanks.

This scope makes our MSO 4000 at work look ancient

It’s fun to see you dig into stuff really deep like this. I’m tempted to buy one of those to play around now. It would be nice if you had some screen recording software on your Windows computer, to avoid the artifacts of recording a screen. I look forward to your next video. See ya next time, bye.

You should check out what the reMarkable paper tablet is doing. It's using an actual e-ink display, but updates fast enough for latency-free handwriting (directly on top of the display - it uses a stylus digitzer made by Wacom I believe). It's actually so fast that you can't detect any latency at all when writing or sketching. It's also very high resolution - 1872x1404. No flickering or updating on the display while drawing, or erasing. It's pretty amazing to use, I own one myself. It does occasionally perform a full screen refresh, but it's so fast that it's unintrusive - and it only occurs while you are in the menus or something like that, never really when actually drawing on it. You can also erase and such, but I guess once they got the drawing figured out, erasing was kind of a freebie. And it's true e-paper as well - it maintains the image even with the battery removed or what not. I have no clue how they made it happen. It must have incredibly fast response time - it's as smooth to use as a Wacom tablet on a PC, looking at a 60hz screen.

Thank you, this helped immensely!

TIL there are multiple e-paper types. The one described here is electrophoretic. There also exists gyricon, where instead of a bunch of pigment particles, each cell contains a small bead that is magnetically polarized and colored, so that it spins in place to present the desired hemisphere. It occurs to me that one could have a sphere with colored poles and a stripe along its equator. You could then have electrodes along the display surface to orient the sphere to show one of its poles, and in addition have a electrodes in the middle of the paper's cross section, which would cause the sphere to orient so that its equator is visible at the paper's face. This would give a 3 color per pixel display. I hope that makes sense.

So cool. I've been using these displays in couple of my projects. I will definitely try your library updates. Also fantastic explanation, i was wondering what was going on in background. Only thing i improved upon the original library was i added massive selection of fonts And ported it to nrf52 ble micro

Thanks for the video. The eInk/ePaper displays are really nice. They will certainly be more popular with hobbyists when the prices come down a bit on the larger panels. I didn't know there were some with the extra red colour. That is the most impressive scope I've seen so far. 8 channels with up to 8 digital inputs each? Very nice and also very expensive.

Brothers, our prayers has been heard, he's back! And with 1/2 hour video!

Today sir you blew my mind. I had no idea why those displays looked different. I guess i just thought they were ultra cheap. Very cool

Great video! Looks like a Tektronix ad! Haha. Very informative, thank you.

If you haven't already used this, OBS can effectively save you from pointing the camera at the screen and seeing those distortions (lines). I use it in conjunction with anything else I may put together in regards to video. Might be a bit more editing (or similarly, the same), it would take less time in regards to repositioning the camera and zoom.

A true science channel on youtube, so rare these days.

Im fairly excited for "full" color e-ink displays. E ink has been teasing them for quite a few years now, and sony has shown off a few prototypes as well, though they seem to have a much wider color range compared to the E-ink ones. They are what i think they call EDP displays, apparently it uses low temperature a-si TFT's.

Brilliant. Thanks for this

Would love to see another epaper video especially with the new color screens and stuff that are coming out!

Thanks for this video !!! at last the oscilloscope is a tool (a good one ok...) but the real benefits are the explications and the study work to know how e-paper wokrs for that two words for you : Maximum Respect !!!

it's great seeing your videos again. Could you make a video on NFC or RFID?

Very interesting video! - While there _might_ be some secrecy involved, I have to give it to the customer support of both Good Display and Waveshare though: they at least professionally answered my questions, saying that VCOM LUT cannot be changed for the 7.5 inch display (respective sections are missing in the code). And suggesting me to buy their updated, quicker display. :)

This oscilloscope is made by the God. I need it but I don't deserve it. Btw, I subbed to you. I love this kind of hardcore embedded systems hacking. That's why CNLohr is my another favorite.

Wondering if you can think of a way to get all of those active matrix transistors to open at once so that any signal going into the display would just pass through to the pixels directly? I'm basically curious if it's possible to get an active matrix display to electrically respond to input similar to a passive matrix liquid crystal display without an gating?

Just in time, when I am looking for a new scope, I am so much into your videos about interesting stuff. Can you describe the decision making behind 5 series? There is also new 3 and 4 series (maybe not available at time of your purchase). If you have time for that, can you elaborate what would you miss on 5 series compared to 3 and 4? Thanks!

Ngrok + Kindle paperwhite + custom app = awesomeness. Considering posting a video shortly.

I haven't played with e-paper displays yet but I'm a big fan of WaveShare's toys. I use their FPGA kits for all kinds of projects. You've mentioned permanent burn-in and/or damage - do you have any idea of what the possible mechanisms for that would be? I can't picture a way in which you could damage these cells even with strong polarization, based on how you've described their theory of operation. The only thing that comes to mind is some kind of cell overheating that could perhaps fuse some of those powder particles together which are presumably at least partially plastic (I'm thinking of laser printer toner), or perhaps damage to the fluid in which they're suspended.. many lubricants for instance increase in viscosity after enough heating/cooling cycles, which in this case would cause the cell to transition slower and slower unless you increase the drive voltage, up to a point. The thermal conductivity of the fluid may be low, so while there's plenty of thermal mass in the entire display, it's conceivable that there could be high localized heating within the tiny cells, which could cause damage if the rate of heating exceeds the rate of conduction of that heat away from the cells. Come to think of it, you could in theory use per-cell heating and the resulting change in fluid viscosity to control transition rate for some purpose. Thank you for the video!!

Best source for details on these e-ink devices I've ever seen. One thing I would love to be able to hack these displays to be able to do is to be able to read the current content off the device. Imagine a reader that you attach the e-ink display to and it can determine what's displayed on it already. Based on what you found scraping off coverings and such from the displays - would it be possible to somehow determine what the display's contents were simply from the display itself? Think of it as a very slow but visual static RAM.

I bet that logic probe is worth more than my entire lab xD

Cool stuff as usual. I was thinking we would see some ruined displays, as a demo how not to drive those displays.

Nice video have wondered about those waveshare e paper displays want to use one and a 3 inch capacitive touchscreen add a decent sbc say a 96boards unit any just need correct headers than play on upgrade or down to easy.

EInk has _huge_ Electronic Ink Display Modules (with 31" 4096 color or 41" 16 color greyscale) for less than $2500; also tiny B&W modules for under $100. Here's a quote from their Website: "EC312TT2 is a reflective electrophoretic E Ink technology display module based on TFT active matrix with color filter design. It has 31.2” active area with 2560 x 1440 pixels, the display is capable to display 4096 colors depending on the display controller and the associated waveform file it used.".

Never clicked faster! Great videos!

Don't know specifics (like waveforms) but to prevent 'ghosting' kindle is using something like your quick lookup tables, so it can refresh faster, but redraws entire screen (flashing white and black) every 4-6 pages, don't know if the page amount is random or is it determining it somehow, like amount of pixel change from last full screen redraw.

That scope in utterly ridiculous wow

I've never seen such a magnificent awesome oscilloscope...

That oscilloscope is incredible! And here I was content with my GDS-1054B lol.

Great video!

Could you explain how the dual screen smartphones (yotaphone hisense A2/A6) interface their eink display with the SoC? They can achieve very high refresh rate.

Think you could get greyscale out of one of these displays, perhaps by changing the image memory during the display update or similar? I'd be very interested to know if you've got it working since the text on my displays could use a bit of antialiasing. Thanks!

What a great job, Thank you

You can do partial update on Eink displays, you just need a different library that supports it.

that is it. I have decided this man just knows everything.

What pixel resolution is the red,black,white display?

So would you use these for like low powered gadgets mainly? They seem kind of trivial at that size. Awesome video BTW!!!!!!

Since it’s suspended in a type of oil, could you warm the display up to make the oil less viscous? If that would work the frame rate can be raised even more with the particles shifting through the oil faster. Just a thought

Awesome. I did a similar hack but didn't really understand what I was changing in those mysterious waveform tables. Do you know any hack for true partial refresh, ie only updating part of the screen? Some support it, others don't. I found the ones that don't, you can fake it a bit by changing resolution, so that makes me think it's just a software difference.

Fantastic. I just acquired a small tricolor display and the update process is slow and annoying (and possibly should have an epilepsy warning). Improving that opens up a lot more use cases. For what it's worth, the Pi version of their software comes with a Python version if people aren't comfortable with C. Just checked the info page for my module and it says that partial refresh is not available. It is for the 2-color one though so I may go for that.