This project began with a simple question: What if e-paper could be more open, faster, dynamic, and in the hands of every creator? I set out on this path because I felt the same frustrations many of you have shared: hours in front of screens, fatigue, distraction, and tools that demanded attention instead of supporting it. What I wanted was something closer to paper: calm, readable, and supportive. Thanks to your backing, support, and encouragement, that idea has become real. Together, we have crossed the finish line of this campaign and opened the door to what comes next.
E-paper has long been defined by limits: slow refresh, narrow use cases, and closed ecosystems. By making it faster and open, we are shifting those tradeoffs. That shift creates new space for interaction, creativity, and discovery, opening paths for ideas that were never feasible before. When you change the tradeoffs, you change what is possible.
To make that shift real, we built Glider, our open-hardware FPGA-based controller. It drives panels at 75 Hz, reduces latency below 100 ms, and offers multiple refresh modes for different needs. You can type in fast monochrome, read in high-quality greyscale, or experiment with entirely new modes. Unlike closed systems, everything here is open to learn from, modify, and build upon.
Turning a vision into hardware takes persistence and involves at least one prototype lost to water pouring through the ceiling of your apartment and months lost to a global chip shortage, and, well, you get the idea… Ni modos, after those setbacks, many iterations, and countless refinements, our board design is now finalized and ready for production. Supply is secured for both the 6-inch and 13-inch e-paper panels, ensuring stability for the first run. Certification is underway at our testing lab. Once that is complete, our manufacturing partners are prepared to begin production and assembly.
But this is not just about shipping hardware. The real breakthroughs will come from what you build: experiments, demos, research, and unexpected uses. Already, community members are sharing work on improving color accuracy, testing new panels, creating their own e-paper devices, and exploring software integration. Open hardware works best when we share it, expand it, and iterate on it together.
Share your experiments, break things, learn things, teach others, suggest features, host demos, and more. Every contribution, large or small, pushes this project further and helps shape the next chapter.
Stay connected and help shape what comes next: join our Discord or Matrix community, explore our GitHub, follow us on Mastodon, and grab a kit to be part of this journey.
Nos vemos por ahÃ, chao.