Each bookworm has their very own distinctive tastes in literature. Some prefer to devour pulp sci-fi books earlier than mattress, whereas others like thriller when they’re stretched out on a chair on the seashore. These personalised preferences additionally prolong to how they prefer to learn. What’s your choice? Paper or plastic? If the power to hold hundreds of books on an e-reader is extra necessary to you than flipping via bodily pages, then Joey Castillo’s Open Ebook Contact is an e-reader that you need to get acquainted with.
The Open Ebook Contact shall be launching quickly on Crowd Provide, and because the title implies, it’s open supply and comes geared up with a touchscreen interface. Higher but, techies shall be to know that this e-reader is constructed round an ESP32-S3 microcontroller, and it’s meant to be hacked. Don’t strive that together with your Kindle until you’re out there for an costly paperweight!
The high-res show can also be good for graphics (📷: Oddly Particular Objects)
This isn’t simply one other DIY gadget cobbled collectively from spare elements. The Open Ebook Contact is smooth, fashionable, and remarkably skinny at underneath a centimeter in thickness, and all the {hardware} is housed inside a 3D-printable enclosure. Regardless of its minimalist design, this e-reader is filled with spectacular {hardware} and considerate engineering.
The gadget’s dual-core ESP32-S3 microcontroller gives each Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. Meaning your Open Ebook Contact can sync content material wirelessly, talk with different units, and even act as a platform for completely new functions. The system additionally consists of 16 MB of flash reminiscence, giving loads of area for complicated firmware and customized fonts, together with 8 MB of high-speed SRAM to deal with demanding duties like parsing EPUB recordsdata. There’s additionally a MicroSD card slot for exterior storage, guaranteeing you’ll by no means run out of area to your digital library.
The 4.26-inch ePaper touchscreen has a 480×800-pixel decision, packing as many pixels as some bigger 7.5-inch shows right into a a lot smaller footprint. The result’s a crisp, paper-like studying expertise that appears nice in each textual content and image-heavy books. And for studying at evening, the gadget consists of front-facing lights powered by ten LEDs — 5 heat and 5 cool. These LEDs supply fine-tuned brightness and coloration temperature management for any atmosphere, from vivid daylight to complete darkness.
The case is just one centimeter thick (📷: Oddly Particular Objects)
The 1,800 mAh LiPo battery is each rechargeable by way of USB Sort-C and user-replaceable. It has sufficient juice to final for days and even weeks of energetic studying and months on standby. Energy effectivity comes from leveraging the ESP32’s low-power RISC-V coprocessor, a lesson realized from the developer’s earlier Sensor Watch undertaking.
As soon as the design is finalized and shipments start, all schematics, firmware, and 3D fashions shall be launched underneath an open supply license. There isn’t a phrase on precisely when that shall be but, however you possibly can join notifications if you wish to be one of many first to get your arms on an Open Ebook Contact.
