We’ve entered the final hours of the campaign! That means this is your last chance to get a Diptyx E-reader at the campaign price of $230 (USD). After the end of the campaign, you can still order through Crowd Supply, but at a slightly increased price.

Now on to the update:

Small Improvements

In the meantime, I’ve been working on a plethora of small improvements to better the user experience. Some of these were suggested by members of the community, so if you have any other ideas or suggestions, feel free to reach out!

Pinning Books

You can now easily pin your favorite books with a single press of a button. Pinned books are shown with a heart emoji and are listed under the Favorite books tab, which is always available at the top of your library.

Your favorite books are now conveniently listed together.

New Settings

Some additional settings have been added:

• Sunlight mode: This instantly powers down the displays after updating, which reduces artifacts when reading in direct sunlight.
• Show progress percentage: Toggles whether to display reading progress as a percentage or as the number of pages
• Store data on SD: Toggles whether to store book metadata (progress, indexing data, etc.) on the ESP32's internal storage or on the SD card. Toggling this will also automatically transfer the data from one to the other
• Haptic buzzer intensity: Adjusts the intensity of the haptic buzzer

Faster Image Rendering

The image loading pipeline has received a major overhaul. Besides JPEG images, PNG images are now supported as well. Additionally, JPEGs are now decoded at the smallest size possible, instead of decoding the image at full size and then scaling it down. Finally, a more efficient image caching system has been implemented, which drastically improves loading times in books with lots of images.

A Big Thanks to the Community

I am extremely grateful for all the attention this project has gotten, not only from local and international news platforms, but also from enthusiasts on platforms like Discord, Reddit, and similar.

The mission of open-source hardware and software is something I strongly believe in, so I’m glad that many share this vision. Open-source projects not only empower consumers by providing full control over the things they own, but can also lower barriers of entry by providing powerful tools. The development of the Diptyx E-reader is a good example of this: open-source projects like KiCad and FreeCAD made it possible to design this device, and continue to make it possible for others to modify it at no additional cost.

This project is standing on the shoulders of giants, whom I would like to thank again:

• FreeCAD
• KiCad
• VSCode
• ESP-IDF
• FreeRTOS
• Atomic14's DIY Epub reader
• Unifont
• Monobit
• miniz
• PNGdec
• tjpgd3
• tinyxml2
• tinyfs
• tinyUSB

And probably many, many more…

Up next

Now that the campaign is nearing its end, we can start to look at the next steps in this journey. First up is finishing the certification process, which is currently in progress. In the meantime, preparations are being made to get production ready to run quickly and smoothly. Updates on this process will be posted here, though at a slower pace. For small updates on the firmware, you can follow the project on Hackaday, while other information, such as high-res pictures, can be found on the Diptyx website.

Many interesting challenges lie ahead, but I’m sure we’ll get through them. Stay tuned!

The latest batch of prototypes, the design is now almost finalized.