So its been a while since I have posted an update. I do a weekly email update for anyone who has signed up for it over on the website, but I always forget to post the same news here.

For any of you nor getting those emails, things are ticking along well, I have done another spin of the PCB, and am waiting for the test boards back from the fab. There are many changes on there, which deserve a post of their own when the boards land, but as long as my plans work out, this will be the hardware done enough to launch crowdfunding!!

While trying to price things up ready for crowdfunding, I contacted the manufatures of the awesome little e-ink screens I have been using, and discovered it would be many months before I could get more screens for my test boards. This got be hunting for alternatives, but they all had disadvantages (wrong size, lower resolution, eats i/o pins). I even considered the possibliity of going colour!! but the general consensus on social media was that people liked the project because if the e-ink screen.

I had almost given up looking for alternatives, when I stumbled upon some interesting reflective LCD screens that are designed to be a drop in replacement for e-ink.

 I had seen them in the past, but couldnt really find a reliable source for them until now.

A few messages on alibaba and some shipping time later, and I had some samples in hand

They are the same size (almost) and resolution as the e-ink screen I have been using, but being LCD they should be faster!!

So after some messing about with different libraries, I managed to use u8g2 and get the thing awake

Being a different library than I was using before, I needed to re-jig a load of code to get my original 'OS' working. so I plugged away. Initially I wasnt all that impressed with the speed, here is a little side by side of e-ink vs RLCD (sorry its a short!!). 

you can see that it refreshes across the screen like a wave, and is barely any faster than the e-ink

some tinkering later, and I managed to switch it over from software SPI to hardware SPI, and also found a bus speed setting for good mesure!! now it really flys with no sign of the curtain refresh

One of the advantages of the speed, we can do things that would grind it to a crawl on e-ink, things like showing every file on the SD card as it is hunting for the folder structure. The goal was to make it clear that the device is thinking and not hung, but it ended up looking like a real mess!!

So there is a bit more tweaking to get the most out of the screen, but it looks promising!!

I will do a proper video comparing to 2, there are advantages and disadvantages for each. I think it will be possible to offer both options on crowdfunding, so people can choose which they like most :)