Does the AlphaSmart have a full sized keyboard? It’s hard to get a sense of size from the Amazon photos (and they call it a “handheld”).
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Has anybody thought about grabbing an Apple eMate 300 of the 'bay?
I always kind of wanted one back in the day…
A nice touch would be adding solar charging. Harvest energy from ambient light. The energy for a page turn is not much, and the time to read a page could be enough to soak enough millijoules even from room-grade light.
Either put the cells on the screen bevel, on the housing the reader is carried in, or - best but least DIY - use a transparent panel over the screen, with energy harvesting from near-infrared that our eyes won’t use anyway.
Marketing in its current form works because most people are dumb. 
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Could be fun. Mechanical switches are an important area, tactile feel of keyboards even more so, and then there’s the whole world of material engineering of electrical contacts themselves, enough to deserve several monographs.
full-sized qwerty, yes.
It’s about the same size KB as on a 13" laptop.
Awww, man, I had one like that as a kid. It’s the reason I still bash the hell out of keyboards to this day 
Tinyxp has all that stuff stripped out, does it not?
The other $250 goes to cover the high manufacturing and distribution costs due to the limited production run.
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No, but I have been following the project for awhile. Frankly the whole thing has felt very underwhelming, what with the lack of being able to go back and edit )not even a backspace button.) The use of their own cloud storage thing (sure it’s tied to evernote but it still requires their own servers.)
Frankly the Alphasmart would be better due to being easier to carry around in a bag, having less of a ‘LOOK AT hoW tRENDY AND COOL AND RETRO I AM!’
That and the alphasmart had 700+ hours on a set of three AA batteries. It did the ‘one stroke text dump’ thing too. Sadly it couldn’t compete and it was, when netbooks started becoming a thing, $225, then down to $175, then finally $120, and then they got outpriced by tablets even though they had the advantage of an education market that could buy them in bulk rather than hoping and praying hipster douchbags will want to be SEEN writing with their giant clunky thing.
As you can see, I am not a fan. Then again I just want my alphasmart neo back. It wasn’t perfect; as it could have used an sd card slot and a better screen, but I like it far better than this thing.
To anyone that gets one. Please, enjoy it. Don’t let my salt shaker’s worth of annoyance turn you off from the device you want. Also if you can, hack it. See what this ‘open’ device will really let you do. Tell me if the e-ink screen is as fragile as the one that was on my nook (which didn’t survive a six inch drop.)
Prove me wrong and show me that it is an awesome device.
Same reasons I haven’t I expect. It’s impossible to gt a raspberry zero, and finding a satisfactory screen that both meets power and size requirements is difficult without it costing a small fortune. Seriously, how is it we can get near IPS full color HD screens for cheaper than a decent sized black and white lcd screen?
Edit: For those wondering, or that have the electrical knowledge. I listed on this BBS the sort of device I want for these kind of situations.
I do not have a little salt over this thing getting the hype it did right as rennisance learning stopped selling the alphasmart. I do not have a shaker, canister, or even trailer of salt over it. I have entire mines worth of salt over the verbose press and fawning this hipster centric piece of junk has gotten right as Alphasmart died. Where was the press then? Where was all the praise and fawning when that device needed it? Where were people publicly and loudly going on at how it is the best counter ever to useless iPads in every classroom?
When the Alphasmart needed that press it was just the niche that were flustered and frustrated at how hard it was to get anyone to care, and then this stupid thing comes along and is suddenly everyone’s little darling.
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Well, I have a Pi Zero- it’s running Rasplex right now, but I suppose that’s just temporary.
This might turn into an actual project for me.
What do you mean by: [quote=“singletona082, post:90, topic:74156”]
useless iPads in every classroom
[/quote]
Because that’s not been my experience with them. At all.
PROFIT!
Double the cost of the units for the 1% who read outside and could use the feature…
As I mentioned, I’m trying to do exactly that but just for myself and it has been a backburner thing for a while.
The display (battery suckers) is actually the hardest part here along with the enclosure.
That’s a manufacturing issue for a brand new product. The supply issues will ease. The same thing happened when the Pi 2 came out.
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It’s weirdly difficult to find larger e-ink displays.
This kind of thinking is why we cannot have nice things.
Quite many people enjoy reading outside, you may like to go to any park when it is sunny.
Few $ for the cells and the charging chip that ideally has to do the optimal power tracking point of the solar panel, e.g. the LTC3108, which has both the MPPT, and constant current/constant voltage charging output, and there should be some cheaper alternative for that one too. Nothing more.
The transparent thin film kind of panel could be integrated in the display itself, further reducing cost. I wouldn’t be surprised if it over time becomes a standard feature of the eink displays.
A moderately big solar cell can be 2-4 watts of power, let’s count 3. A Kindle-grade reader battery is typically about 1.5 Ah, which at 3.7 volts is 5.6 Wh which is about 20 kJ. Which for a 3-watt panel takes 6 hours to charge. More at less bright light.
Thick silicon-substrate cells are annoyingly fragile (don’t ask how I know) and the scrap ones are often aluminium-patterned so pretty much impossible to solder at (also don’t ask how I know); maybe could be attached with conductive adhesives. But there are flexible cells out there, which can be beneficial for e.g. adding to that fake-leather booklet cover many readers have.
The spare parts are relatively easy. But getting controller boards for them, not so.
There are datasheets out there, for precious few of the panels.
I wonder if it would be possible to take a rooted Kindle, and feed the display with known patterns and record the communication over the data lines, and then reverse-engineer the waveforms and protocol; then the spare part displays would be usable. One of the minor challenges is the nonstandard voltage, the things typically need ±15 volts or so.
Some more data here:
http://essentialscrap.com/eink/
There’s a problem here:
A kindle’s battery life is measured in page turns: when the page is turned, the kindle refreshes the entire page, consuming power. Then the screen sleeps, but the image remains.
Now, consider a word processing document. Each time a letter is added to the document, the display consumes power, Instead of 250 page flips for a book, it’s a few hundred times that amount. Perhaps redrawing a character sips less power than an entire page refresh.
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True that- I’d not even considered that.
Given that this Freewrite thing is super heavy, let’s say I’ve got space inside for The World’s Largest Battery™ and have power to burn.
Retina iPad screen? That’d sure look nice…
from its kickstarter. A bit square for what I’d want though.
Why should I pay for something in my device, raising the overall cost and complexity, for something most people don’t want?
No, it doesn’t. Not anymore unless you tell it that you want it to do that. Kindles have done partial refreshes for years now.
A little too small.
To avoid having to deal with the logistics of charging ever again? And if there’s a supercap instead of battery so the power supply won’t degrade over time, and polymer elyt caps instead of the aluminium ones, the device’s lifetime can be virtually unlimited, postapocalypse-grade.
Add a solar-chargeg server with file storage and suitable content, and you have a knowledge base that’s independent on The Grid.
And there are quite many people who would like this. I got affirmative responses pretty much whenever I proposed that.
