The Modos Paper Monitor

At Modos, our mission is to help you live a healthy life by creating technology that respects your time, attention, and well-being. We are an open-hardware and open-source company, and are building an ecosystem of devices to re-imagine personal computing and build a collective vision of calm, intentional, and humane technology.

Today, we'd like to introduce the Modos Paper Monitor: an open-hardware standalone portable monitor made for reading and writing, especially for people who need to stare at the display for a long time.

*In time, we will offer a single USB Type-C connection from the PC to the monitor for data and power and provide adapter options for machines without Type-C connectivity.

There is currently no universally good way to drive the screen, this is due to the technical limitations of Eink technology. As a result, different display driving strategies/modes were designed to address different use cases. Typically on Eink monitors, one would see multiple modes: text mode, graphics mode, video mode, etc. However, we think the solutions offered by existing Eink monitors have several drawbacks.

For example: Imagine you type 2 letters, and before the 2nd one is displayed, the controller starts updating the 1st one. Now the controller needs to wait for the first one to finish updating before starting displaying the 2nd one. This introduces a worst-case delay of ~100ms.

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