E Ink - Page 18

In August 2015 Polyera, a US-based OTFT backplane developer, announced their first product, the Wove Band flexible E Ink smart band, to be released in the second half of 2016. We wanted to learn more about Polyera's technology and business, and the company's Special Projects VP, Brendan Florez, was kind enough to answer a few questions we had.

Brendan has been with Polyera since 2008. Prior to joining Polyera, Brendan was an early employee at Rosetta, a digital marketing agency. Brendan holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University.

A new crowdfunding campaign at IndieGogo aims to raise $75,000 to produce Smart Stickers, a 40 grams real-time display that uses a 2.7" E Ink display and connects to any smartphone to display notifications, missed call, reminders or any other information you can think of via the API.

The Smart Sticker costs only $30, and if the campaign is successful, the first products will (hopefully) be available by February 2016.

UK-based Plextek Consulting is developing E Ink based panels to cover drones with an aim to make them invisible. Plextek is using 8 inch by 10 inch E Ink panels that are monochrome and lightweight (probably flexible panels). The panels can change their pattern and design and by adding a camera can help camouflage the drone.

Plextek actually wanted to cover military vehicles, but this was too difficult and they switched to drones. Making military vehicles and aircraft invisible using flexible displays is an old idea - I remember the US military playing around with flexible OLEDs back in 1998 or so.

The GoodEReader web site launched a $220,000 crowd funding campaign to develop the "ultimate e-reader". If successful, they will develop a 6" touch front-lit 1430x1080 E Ink Carta e-reader that features a 1Ghz CPU, 512MB RAM and 8GB of storage (plus a microSD slot). The e-reader will be based on an open Android 6 operation system. 

The Ultimate E-reader will cost $189.99. Together with the e-reader device, the project will also launch the first App Store designed specifically for E Ink devices. 

Pharmaceutical packaging solution developer Palladio collaborated with E Ink to create a new advanced packaging solution specifically for pharmaceuticals, called PhutureMed. The new solution supports a number of features to monitor the quality of medicines shipped to patients and improve the adherence of patients to prescribed drug therapies.

PhurureMed packaging has a small integrated E Ink display and sensors to constantly monitor the ambient conditions of the medication. The E Ink display shows the patient or customer any events that occur outside the required handling conditions, even if the batteries are completely drained.

Looksee's announced the smart Eyecatcher E Ink Bracelet earlier this year, and now the company launched a successful crowdfunding campaign to fund this interesting device. The company's goal was to raise $75,000 and they quickly met the goal.

The Eyecatcher is a smart wearable device that has a large curved E Ink display (150 PPI) that can show custom images and phone notifications. The display is always on, and the device should last for months on a single charge - depending on the number of times you will change the display. If you update once every hour it will last for a year.

A few weeks ago Polyera unveiled their first product, the Wove Band - which is based on the company's OTFT flexible backplane technology. Now Polyera revealed the technical specification of this interesting device.

The Wove Band will use a touch E Ink display that is 30 x 156 mm in size with a 1040x200 resolution. Other features include a 1Ghz dual-core CPU, 4GB of storage, 512 MB of RAM and a 230 mAh battery. The Wove runs on Polyera's Wove OS which is based on Android 5.1.

Microsoft presented a new prototype tablet keyboard cover that they call DisplayCover, and it includes a 1280x305 E Ink touch screen. This can be used to access applications via shortcuts, and can also accept stylus input and touch gestures.

Microsoft says they opted for an E Ink because it's very power efficient. This is just a prototype, but hopefully Microsoft will commercialize a similar tablet cover one day.

Polyera unveiled their first product, the Wove Band. This smartband device is truly flexible and uses the company's OTFT (organic-TFT) technology flexible backplane technology and an E Ink display.

Polyera will start shipping samples in December to developers and artists, and the commercial launch is planned for mid-2016.

FlexEnable (recently spun-off from PlasticLogic) demonstrated their OTFT-based flexible displays, including E Ink, LCD and OLED display: