General Musing

When in 2000 Philips Research first announced their development of e-paper I was very excited I went as far as to investigate what would be needed to attach a microcomputer which could attach to the e-paper and create a real electronic NewsPaper. I got a microcomputer manufacturer, who gave me an option of including bluetooth so data could be transferred via a mobile device and was willing to integrate the e-paper. The specification that Philips had announced for the e-paper were not completely clear regarding the integration of the device, and we didn’t consider this to be too big an issue. And a friend had already been working on a mobile payment system, which I wanted to use. I even had a large content provider willing to fund a possible a PoC.

The specifications for the device contained:

• Mobile ARM processor
• some MBs storage
• some MBs memory
• USB
• BlueTooth using PDA Sync or Serial Port (COM1) with Data Transfer

The microcomputer was able to run a 2.4 linux kernel, with all of the hardware supported by the kernel. The only thing I would be required to do is write a driver for the e-paper, which I didn’t consider rocket science. The only real issue might have been battery-life, although the specification for the e-paper had extremely low power requirements.

Innocent as I was I thought that Philips Research would be overjoyed to have somebody ask them to produce a prototype with no cost to them. They didn’t even reply to my repeated mails.