NLnet Grant Announcement

Thank you to everyone who has completed our community survey and reached out. The response has been overwhelmingly positive; we’ve had over 2,500 people complete our community survey and have learned much about people’s needs and what they want in an e-ink device. In addition, many people have expressed interest in contributing. In a follow-up blog post, we aim to share more of what we’ve learned, what we've been up to and where we are going next.

To that end, earlier this year, Modos was selected for a grant from the NLnet Foundation. This grant will allow us to complete the following milestones:

1. Documentation of our EPDC: Provide an overview of the project, implemented and planned features, and reasoning behind these features: Detailed description of the E-Ink driving mechanism, FPGA gateware architecture, MCU firmware architecture, and onboarding guide for contributors.
2. Board revision update: Address existing issues on the early prototype board and prepare for new revision production and production of a new set of prototype boards.
3. Firmware/gateway/software implementation: Implementation of various features such as negotiation of USB-C alt mode, communication between MCU and FPGA, error diffusion dithering, waveform lookup, framebuffer operation, and USB communication protocol between MCU and PC, and an initial user-space utility example.
4. Chassis design and assembly: Designing a chassis for the e-ink monitor and printing engineering samples and testing. FreeCAD files for the chassis will be made available to the community.

Thank you, NLnet and NGI Zero, for sponsoring our work and supporting our mission of building open hardware and open-source E Ink devices.

We’ve been progressing steadily towards these milestones and aim to complete our milestones by early next year. Subsequent posts will include our progress towards these goals.

Follow our progress on RSS, Github, Matrix, Mastodon, and Twitter, or Get in touch with us.

Best,
The Modos Team