Modos Is Open Hardware, Easy On The Eyes

Since e-ink first hit the market a couple decades back, there’s always murmurs of “that’d be great as a second monitor”— but very, very few monitors have ever been made. When the commecial world is delivering very few options, it leaves room for open source hardware projects, like the Modos Glider and Paper Monitor, projects now seeking funding on Crowd Supply.

As far as PC monitors go, the Modos isn’t going to win many awards on specs alone. The screen is only 13.3″ across, and its resolution maxes out at 1600 x 1200. The refresh rate would be totally unremarkable for a budget LCD, at 75 Hz. This Paper Monitor isn’t an LCD, budget or otherwise, and for e-ink, 75 Hz is a blazing fast refresh rate.

Before you declare noone could get productive work done on such a tiny screen, stop and think that that screen is larger, and refreshing faster, than everyone’s favourite Macintosh. It can even run up to 8x the colour depth, and people got plenty done back in the day with just black-and-white. Some people still do. 

Now that we’ve defended the idea, let’s get to the good part: it’s not just a monitor being crowdsourced. The driver board, called Glider, is fully open with code and design files on the Modos Labs GitHub repository. We sometimes complain about what counts as open hardware, but these guys are the true quill. Glider is using an FPGA with a custom clever configuration to get screens refreshing at that impressive 75 Hz. With the appropriate panel (there’s a list on Git– you’ll need an E Ink branded display, but you aren’t limited to the 13.3″ panel) the board can drive every pixel independently, forcing updates only on those pixels that need them. That’s an impressive trick and we’re not surprised it needed an FPGA to pull off. (It uses a Xilinx Spartan 6, for the record, running a config called Casper)

Because everything is open source, you can do things like you see in the API demo video (embedded below), where every panel in what looks like a tiled display manager is running a different picture mode. (There are more demo videos at the CrowdSupply page). We’re not sure how often that would come up in actual use– that functionality is not yet exposed to a window manager, for example, though it may yet be. Perhaps more interesting is the ability to customize specific refresh modes oneself, rather than relying on someone else’s idea of what a “browsing” or “gaming” mode should be.

For anyone interested, there’s still time to get in on the ground floor: the campaign on CrowdSupply ends September 18, 2025 at 04:59 PM PDT, and has levels to nab yourself a dev kit. It’s 599 USD for the 13″ and 199 USD for a 6″ version. (It’s the same board, just different displays.)  For anyone not interested, there is no deadline for not buying things, and it usually costs nothing.

Thanks to [moneppo] for the tip!