Esquire 75th Anniversary E-Ink Teardown
Back in July, Joel Johnson of BoingBoing Gadgets interviewed Peter Griffin, a Deputy Editor for Esquire. The interview focuses on how Esquire will use E-Ink in it’s October 2008, 75th Anniversary edition. Peter speaks about how they are looking forward to seeing what hackers will do to the display, saying “The data will be baked into the circuitry. Figuring out how to reprogram the e-paper controller or installing an entirely new one will be up to the hackers.” The issue just hit newsstands today and like many other hackers across the country I dutifully snagged a copy and proceeded to slice it up and mess with its innards.
Upon first glance, especially when looking at lo-res web videos of the display in action it appears as if Esquire has magically procured a full color E-Ink display. Alas, Esquire just overlaid a transparent coloured overlay on top of the monochrome E-Ink display.
The second E-Ink display is located on the inside cover, in an ad for the Ford Flex. This display makes the image of the Flex appear to be moving – or at least it tries to.
We gain access to the displays and the board that runs them by running a knife along the top, inside and bottom of the cover which then folds out to the left. Removing the foam insert reveals the bottom E-Ink display.
Looking at the board we see that it’s a very simple, 2-layer PCB made by Zuhai Forewin with only 3 main ICs of which 2 are the same chip – an 8-stage shift-and-store bus register IC (NXP HEF4094BT) made by NXT Philips with the other chip being an 8-bit PIC microcontroller (PIC 12F629 – 4.8mb PDF) made by Microchip. The board and displays are powered by six 3v Lithium Coin batteries (model CR2016) which according to Esquire should provide you with around 90 days of blinking goodness.
As you may have assumed from the pin count and look of the displays – they appear to be segmented. That is, they are not made up of a grid of addressable pixels that can be turned on and off individually but are instead made up of several regions that may be turned on and off independently. This essentially means that for our purposes these displays are useless junk unless your project entails blinking “The 21st century begins now 
” on and off. Since I have no real interest in such a device this is where my analysis will stop. Those of you who wish to play with this for purely educational purposes you should be able to reprogram the PIC controller to change the blink order and timing of both displays, although it will probably require a chip programmer of some sort.
For a few more pictures of this teardown check out my SmugMug Gallery.