25–26 Apr 2025
Tirana, Albania
Europe/London timezone

Building an Open E-Ink Ecosystem: Hardware, Software, and Wayland Integration

25 Apr 2025, 14:55
25m
Tirana, Albania

Tirana, Albania

Presentation (25 min) Main Track

Speaker

Mr Alexander Soto (Modos Tech, Inc.)

Description

E-Ink displays offer significant advantages in power efficiency and readability, but their integration into modern Linux desktops remains fragmented. Most Wayland compositors assume high-refresh-rate displays, leading to suboptimal rendering, ghosting, and unnecessary power consumption on e-ink panels.

In this talk, we introduce Caster, an open-hardware electrophoretic display controller, designed to improve e-ink rendering and latency. By extending the Wayland Content Type Hint protocol, Caster enables applications to signal content types (e.g., text, images, video) to the compositor, allowing for dynamic refresh optimization on e-ink screens.

We’ll walk through the implementation, showcase a live demo of Caster, and discuss how we can make e-ink a first-class citizen in Linux.

Author(s) Bio

Alexander Soto is a community organizer, educator, software engineer, and founder of Modos. His interests are community-building, social justice, education, and leveraging technology to address social problems.

Twitter and/or Mastodon Handle

https://fosstodon.org/@modos

Participation In-person
Track Main Track
Level of Difficulty Intermediate
Pronouns He/Him/His

Primary author

Mr Alexander Soto (Modos Tech, Inc.)

Presentation materials

There are no materials yet.