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LightInk is an open source DIY E Ink clock that pushes battery life to the extreme. It’s built around an ESP32, a tiny solar cell and low-power custom hardware, with the goal of making a basic watch that can run for months, or even keep itself in high light.<\/p>\n
The device feels like a throwback to the original Pebble era, when smartwatch design was still more about loading the wrist with apps and sensors. The focus here is simple: an always-on E Ink display, very low power consumption and a watch that tries to avoid charging as long as possible.<\/p>\n
This project is based on the same broad idea as Watchy, the open source E Paper viewing platform. The difference is that LightInk goes a little harder on power consumption, using specific hardware options to reduce the small back drains that often make ESP32 wearables suffer from long battery life.<\/p>\n
The title claim is about 2uA consumption when the clock just updates the time. With a 200mAh battery, like the Watchy, the engineer estimates about 400 days of battery life before solar panels and counting. The project’s goal is less than 0.5mAh per day, which is the kind of number that makes regular smartwatch charging cycles look a little silly.<\/p>\n
LightInk uses a TPS63900 power setup with selectable 2.6V and 2.9V outputs, which is enough to power the ESP32 display, RTC, E Ink and WiFi when needed. It also slows down the accelerometer, because even with it disabled it is said to consume about 1uA. For most watches it can register slowly. Here, it is big enough to remove it.<\/p>\n
This is not just a sundial with a strap. LightInk includes capacitive touch instead of buttons, piezo speaker, vibration, LED light for viewing the screen in the dark, WiFi time synchronization, alarms, battery tracking and energy saving modes.<\/p>\n
LoRa and GPS support are also listed, but these are tools for occasional use and are clearly not always-on features. Treat the GPS like you would a sports watch and the 400-day battery story falls apart very quickly. That doesn’t invalidate the claim, but it does show what kind of device this really is.<\/p>\n
The battery count only works because LightInk spends most of its life doing very little. IE Ink is useful because it consumes energy mainly when the screen is updating, not while the image is sitting there. The project also avoids showing seconds, because refreshing the display every second would defeat the whole point.<\/p>\n
Design will set people apart. The current version has a blocky case, a visible solar panel and a design that looks closer to an electronic shelf label than a polished smartwatch. A solar rim or cleaning case would probably look better, but that would also take the project away from the off-the-shelf practicality that makes it possible.<\/p>\n
That difficulty may be part of the appeal. LightInk is not trying to be another Apple Watch, Garmin competitor or Pebble replacement in any general sense. It’s a builder’s project that asks how much battery life you can squeeze out of E Ink, sun, careful firmware work and brutal hardware choices.<\/p>\n
A solar claim also needs context. If the watch keeps raising itself to the light, then a “single charge” isn’t quite the same as running in a closet untouched for over a year. The most useful way to read it is that the base power draw is low enough for a small solar cell to make a real difference.<\/p>\n
LightInk is unlikely to be a mass market product in this form. The project itself notes that building a unit requires a lot of sales, and the plan is primarily to maintain and improve one’s own unit. That makes sense. This is hardware from an open source manufacturer, not something most consumers will come across in a weekend.<\/p>\n
Still, the project is a neat reminder that wearable design doesn’t always have to mean bright screens, multiple sensors and short battery life. Get rid of the fixed background grooves, use E Ink well and make the sun part of the main design. Suddenly, a watch that can run for months doesn’t sound so strange.<\/p>\n
Source: Github via NotebookCheck<\/p>\n
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The post LightInk’s E Ink solar watch claims nearly 400 days of battery life appeared first on Gadgets & Wearables.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LightInk is an open source DIY E Ink clock that pushes battery life to the extreme. It’s built around an ESP32, a tiny solar cell and low-power custom hardware, with the goal of making a basic watch that can run for months, or even keep itself in high light. The device feels like a throwback […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14060,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-14059","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wearables"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runwayritz.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runwayritz.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runwayritz.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runwayritz.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runwayritz.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14059"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.runwayritz.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14059\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14061,"href":"https:\/\/www.runwayritz.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14059\/revisions\/14061"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runwayritz.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runwayritz.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runwayritz.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runwayritz.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}