Think about e-ink is it stays readable even when the charge runs out.

At first I thought “that’s a very specific shopping list for fridge magnets”. :)

I stuck with the recommended full refresh every 15 interactions and partial otherwise. There's also a full refresh when moving from the settings screen back to the main list. Honestly though it probably makes sense to only do a full refresh when unticking (which is rare) or changing screens. The typical use cases are (1) glancing at the screen to make sure something is one the list and (2) ticking things off as they go into the basket. Neither really require a full refresh imho. Some ghosting is acceptable in general use I think

The last time I checked, patents.

there's no secret, they're just expensive to manufacture

That was part of the motivation here: If I can think it up, can AI actually build it, even when it's outside my day-to-day experience? (and can it do it without frying the hardware somehow)

There is exactly one manufacturer of large EPDs, E Ink Corporation.

A few have tried to compete over the years, none have really managed to ramp up production and compete from my understanding. I believe there are some chinese firms making smaller panels now, mainly used in electronic shelf labels for stores.

From my understanding most of the patents for the foundational tech have expired at this point. I believe the panels are just generally very difficult to make, with difficulty ramping up further as panel size goes up, presumably the yield is fairly low.

Honestly it's pretty good, but it's too new to give you an actual number. I haven't had to think about it so far. As a LoRa Meshtastic node the device ran for days and still had plenty of battery.

In normal operation battery life is by how often you do a refresh, the rest of the time it's in deep sleep. I think for this application I could build in a refresh schedule tied to when the house is active (mornings, evenings, weekends) to reduce the number of refreshes. It syncs on touch if it hasn't synced in the last 5 minutes (and there's a button for when your feeling impatient)

I think open source code would sit in the opposite end of the spectrum to Juicero.

Pretty cool! I remembered having a brainstorming session with co-workers about all the cool use-cases for e-ink displays over a decade ago. A product precisely like this was definitely mentioned, as was conference room displays, data center cage information, Kanban-style sticky notes in manufacturing, dynamic game pieces, among others. You'd think simple displays like the PaperMono would be as cheap as bluetooth speakers by now, but I know there are some major patent restrictions.