Do any electronics buffs know how/if I could buy a small number of very small, custom color e-ink displays somewhere? Is there any company that let's you specify desired dimensions of the display?
@danielpunkass I've used https://buydisplay.com before, but it doesn't appear their e-ink goes that small. Still, worth a look because they have a huge variety.
From what I can see, the smallest manufactured e-paper modules are 1.54" and they're monochrome. I can't find anything in colour small enough - AFAIK, proper colour e-paper (i.e. not bi-/tri-colour) is still fairly expensive and novel - e-ink Carta I think is the only mass-produced one.
For my money, I'd go with LED arrays and a diffuser.
@rmccue One of the challenges is I’m not sure I can deliver power to the tiles while the cube is moving. I’m envisioning some kind of contact power while at rest but while moving there would be interruptions.
@danielpunkass You might be able to use a slip ring mechanism of some sort for it - your power usage is equal across each cube so that simplifies things. Communication might be the hard part with a common bus, but an addressed network would handle that.
(Sidenote: lol at the idea of running Ethernet/IP on a Rubik’s cube)
@danielpunkass if it exists you can find it on Alibaba. And if you find something that is "perfecT" but has no documentation and needs to be reverse-engineered, I know a guy.
@danielpunkass I used waveshare, they offer a ton of different sizes. Black and white screens may even support partial updates. Black, red & white screens always need to refresh the whole screen, which means 15 seconds non stop flickering.
@danielpunkass try Aliexpress.com, eg «e ink display component», you'll find hundreds of Shenzhen component suppliers covering a very wide range of commercially available parts. For small unit volume you’ll be stuck with off-the-shelf parts.
@danielpunkass I should add, I would look into an Adruino instead. You could do an Arduino with a mux. I think you can control some e-ink displays with a simple micro. If you had an accelerometer you can “shake to change the board” :)
@danielpunkass WaveShare, Sparkfun and Adafruit are all popular choices. WaveShare distributes on Amazon too. For working with a Pi, you’d need a Pihat but I don’t think a Pi would be low enough power for a Rubik’s cube.
@barchard@danielpunkass if you can’t get them that small you could get cube sized ones and then detect swipes on each side to virtually update rows and columns.
@danielpunkass Check component houses like DigiKey and Mouser for vendors that make such displays and then contact them for something custom if needed.
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