I like the display, but the need for a CMS running in a docker container on the other end to push images is asinine. Why is the eink market this weird?
The visionect server? I actually like that it’s a relatively dumb hardware with “server” software you can choose to run yourself. It’s pretty good software especially from a hardware company.
Yes, because the device is "dumb", it can achieve long battery autonomy. For example, our Joan products can work up to 6 months on battery without recharging.
It’s fine it’s a dumb display, I’m just surprised i can’t just make a socket connection and push some packets into the display over lan. It’s not just “server” software, there’s a full legit web app sitting in the middle.
Listening on a port (running as a server) requires that the network interface remains up at all times, consuming more battery, than a client interface where the network interface can be turned off (or put into low power mode) until the next poll event occurs.
Really depends on the cycle, from experience in a similar project, with a dedicated low-power enabled processor, then waking up, booting and connecting to network draws a lot of power. If you do that often enough you will actually loose power
The current solution offers a management interface for a fleet of such devices with different content and "renderers" and power and activity statistics and charts and an HTTP API interface.
The base eink display doesn't take common image formats natively. Instead images need to be dithered and encoded in a specific format to convey the greyscale or color map. The backend architecture is likely used to convert an html rending into the EPD binary format.
The Visionect Server is able to automatically pre-optimize the images before they're rendered on the device display (e.g. grayscaling, contrast correction).
