A weekend project of mine, I really like the trend of distraction free, digital typewriters, however most of them will set you back between 150-300$.

The etyper is probably the cheapest in its class, costing about 15$ for a WeActStudio 4.2" eink screen and a 23$ Orange Pi Zero 2W running armbian, plus about 2$ of printing cost.

It's a bring your own keyboard device, for now it only works with wired usb-c keyboards.

The case is print in place and doesn't require support, you will need about 8 M2x12mm screws and nuts, where you can cut 4 of those with pliers to make the fit as fasteners for the pi and the other 4 will hold the screen.

That's pretty much it, the case is foldable, I will have an animation for it coming up in the future, code can be found here, it has been created with Claude/Cursor but is fairly stable.

For now the commands are as follows at boot:

Ctrl+S     Save document
Ctrl+N     Save current and create new document
Ctrl+R     Force full display refresh (cleans ghosting)
Ctrl+Q     Save and quit, press it again and it will start the program again

Here's the pin layout you'll need for soldering:

The current version requires you to unscrew the screen by hand to extract the sd card, in future versions you'll be able to connect to a hotspot to extract the written files.

Future versions will also allow you to switch between different documents.

Feel free to fork this version and make your own, lets make these devices cheap!