Esquire E-ink Cover!!
Ok, I have finally found this thing after 2 months of waiting and countless hours of searching and camping out at book stores, I can hack away to my heart's content. I'm sure a lot of you have heart about how Esquire put in Eink in their latest issue of Esquire (October issue). Well, the following is just a small step by step as to how I dismantled it.
So there's the front cover, and it changes, first things first, I break out my trusty exacto knife.
The next part is to remove the cover from the book, you can throw the book away as it's it pretty much recycling. The magazine is pretty crap in terms of content, but, it does come with cologne samples! Something to make you smell nice for the girlfriend.
The magazine is folded at the ends, so I just cut a long the fold, till I was able to split the cover open. I know that there is a glued side, but I didn't want the chance of the paper tearing and damaging the circuit. As I wasn't sure what the circuit board layout was. So here's the cover split open, and baring some innards.
What you see there, is the circuit board (the green) and the back eink panel. They're all fastened to the cover by tape, and you want to be careful when removing, as you don't want to damage the flex cables for the two eink screens (YEH! comes with TWO!).
So there's the rear screen, now all that's left is to remove the other one!
Hoorah! Here are the screens! And that's 6 batteries! (from Radioshack, they're $5 each!)
The cool thing is that it's flexible too!
Now for hacking this thing, here's the biggest disappointment with the screens. They're segmented, as in I cannot change what the screen says. The only thing I can do is change the blinking order. So my hopes and dreams of having a display that can display things that I want are dashed. At best, I have a really hi-tech lightbulb that turns on and off. Well, maybe it's a bit harsh, but it's still a really sweet piece of tech. The greatest thing is that this thing is quite hack friendly. If you look at the circuit board, you'll notice that the connectors are ZIF. Which is a surprise since this cover is technically disposable. So that's a pleasant surprise. I've been searching the interweb, and found that popular science has been able to read some Hex data.
I did take my multimeter to it, and found that it takes 15 V to change the picture. At first I thought it was 1.5, but nope, it's 15 V. We'll see what I can do to it. Personally, i think i'd like to try to cut it in half, but I only have one of these things, so I think i'll think about it another time. But for now, I'm pretty satisfied, but disappointed it wasn't an active matrix screen (I was soo crossing my fingers on that one).
Here's some links to dudes way better than I am with this kind of stuff:
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/09/esquire_eink_cover_hackin.html
http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2008-09/hacking-esquire-e-ink-cover
