Oddly Specific Objects founder Joey Castillo has designed a couple of interesting open hardware projects over the years. Those include the Sensor Watch and Sensor Watch Pro, which replace the PCB in a classic Casio wristwatch with a new board sporting a bunch of sensors that add functionality. But Castillo’s first attempt at making open source hardware was an effort to design an open source Amazon Kindle alternative.

The Open Book Project has gone through several iterations since launching in 2019, and now Castillo has a design he thinks is good enough to sell. Soon you’ll be able to reserve an Open Book Touch eReader through an upcoming Crowd Supply crowdfunding campaign.

Like Castillo’s earlier designs, the Open Book Touch is designed around cheap, low-power hardware. It has a 4.26 inch, 800 x 480 pixel E Ink display and an ESP32-S3 microcontroller.

But while earlier models used physical buttons for page turns and navigation, the new model has a capacitive touchscreen display that should make navigation simpler. Yes, I know that some folks prefer physical page turn buttons, but older designs had a D-Pad below the screen rather than buttons on the sides where they would be easy to reach with your hands while reading an eBook.

Castillo has added support for WiFi and Bluetooth, and the updated design also includes a front-lit display that will make it easier to read in dimly lit environments without adding a clip-on book light. The light’s color temperature is adjustable thanks to five warm LED lights and five cool LEDs.

While the display resolution is certainly on the low side for a modern eReader, it’s worth keeping in mind that this device has a small screen, so the 480p display has a pixel density of 219 pixels per inch, which should allow text to look reasonably sharp.

Castillo also notes that the display is configured to run in 1-bit mode by default (black and white only), but can also support 2-bit grayscale mode.

Other features include 8MB of SRAM and 16MB of flash memory for firmware, a microSD card reader for user-replaceable storage, and a user-replaceable 1800 mAh battery that should be good for “days to weeks of reading time and months of standby” time. There’s a USB-C port for charging.

A fully assembled Open Book Touch measures 77 x 118 x 9.6mm (3″ x 4.6″ x 0.4″) and weighs 85 grams (3 ounces).

Or if you’d rather build your own you’ll be able to download schematics, board files, enclosure designs, and other files from GitHub after the crowdfunding campaign goes live.

The Open Book Touch also runs open source firmware. The default firmware features a UI framework called Focus, which is based on the ESP-IDF framework and FreeRTOS, but users can create their own firmware using Arduino or other platforms and flash their own software to the device.

Pricing hasn’t been announced yet, but you can sign up at the Crowd Supply preview page to receive a notification when the campaign goes live.

via @[email protected] and Hackster.io

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