Epaper esquire deconstructed

photo.jpg, originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

I tore apart the cover of my Esquire e-paper cover issue (blogged about a while back)

The second screen is missing because I peeled the layers apart until non-functional.

The display shown is still clocking along on my office wall. It appears to be 12 "pixels" or regions (e.g. "The 21st Century" is one region that must all be on or off), and has 4 states. White, light gray, dark gray, or black. The two larger ICs on the board are 8-bit shift registers, so it's just wired to cycle through a pattern of 'region 1; region 1, 3 and 8; region 2 and 8...." or such. Pretty simple. I'm guessing the 3rd is a timer, but I didn't look it up.

It makes it pretty useless to hack though. I was hoping it would be a regtangular grid of pixels, in which case you could do some fun stuff with it.

K