Ink at 60 Hz, and the Schematics Are on GitHub

Modos Tech, an open-hardware company founded in Boston in 2022, has opened pre-orders for Flow, a 13.3-inch E Ink monitor that plugs into any computer over a single USB-C cable. The Calm Tech Institute certified it Platinum on August 14. The monochrome model runs $699 and color $799 on Crowd Supply, with shipping scheduled for December.

The numbers place Flow somewhere e-paper has never shipped before: fast enough to type on. It renders text at 300 pixels per inch, the density of a printed page, and refreshes at up to 60 Hz with sub-100-millisecond latency. The mechanism is a display controller built on an AMD Zynq 7000 FPGA that updates only the pixels that change, so the panel gets desktop responsiveness without burning extra full-screen refresh cycles or accelerating wear. The screen is reflective. It bounces room light back at you the way ink on paper does, with an amber frontlight that stays off in a well-lit room. Four modes, tuned for reading, browsing, watching, and writing, sit behind physical buttons on the housing. And the whole design is published under the CERN Open Hardware License: schematics, board files, and firmware source, all on GitHub, from the same team that already shipped a developer kit through Crowd Supply.

A monitor that works with the light already in the room, and that an owner can repair without the company's blessing. E-readers proved the comfort argument for ink two decades ago. Maybe this is what happens when someone finally spends the engineering budget on making ink fast. What if the after-dark glow of a desk turns out to be optional? The real question: how much of a workday made of reading and typing ever needed an emitting screen at all?