I wish more hardware companies treated these kinds of optional add-ons as something the community can run with instead of either productizing them badly or locking them away completely...
I wonder how they achieve the lighting effect from the banner picture? It doesn't look like the Adafruit panel has backlighting built-in, and there isn't anything added in the project.
I see some kind of illumination from below/behind the display. Being from Gamers Nexus, I'd be shocked if it was manipulated. Maybe just a really steep sidelite
Anyone know what the refresh rate for these displays are, at least with the stock firmware? Reading the datasheets didn't help, though maybe I didn't know what to look for.
The refresh rate of eink is kind of...muddy. It depends on temperature and target contrast. With the right waveform and voltage, you can push it pretty far(like 30hz+).
The thing is, Eink's waveform is kind of secret afaik, everyone has different tuning.
As I understand it going faster typically skips steps that are necessary for maintenance of the panel. Fine for a while but if you don't periodically run a "proper" cycle the panel could eventually be permanently damaged.
That's exactly it. I was a firmware engineer at reMarkable making the latest tablets.
We had some secret eink sauce (propriety waveforms) to get the high refresh rates and colour contrast without a full flashing screen reset, but even then you need to run longer maintenance refreshes occasionally.
Pixels are just vertical columns of viscous fluid with charged ink particles. A waveform is just voltage changes over time to these columns to shift the particles up and down. More black to the top = darker shade of grey. Colour (in the gallery display, at least) is the same, just with each CMY particle group having different charges and responses to different waveforms.
Every once in awhile this vertical column gets messy with loose particles distributed through it (ghosting, muddy contrast) so performing a hard rail-to-rail voltage reset forces all the particles up and then down, and gives you a clean slate.
I have a question, hope it's not too sensitive, how do you guy protect your secret waveform ? One with enough tool and determination can just measure voltage at pixel and reverse the whole thing, the chinese can do that in less than a week i bet.
Few years ago I did an educational project to extract waveforms from logic capture - it was doable [1]. But this approach may have limits on newer faster FPGA based controllers.
I always wondered about this as well. Linux regularly gains reverse engineered drivers and it seems like the same would apply. I guess this is probably how the hobbyist projects that drive the panels faster came about? I assume it's the same as the NDAs surrounding SoCs where the entire exercise seemingly only exists to spite the general public while serving no practical purpose. (Well I suppose pandering to nontechnical management's insecurities is a sort of practical purpose but anyway.)
But I was too lazy and/or uninterested to attempt low level tinkering with e-paper myself and these days you can finally purchase some reasonably(ish) fast panels off the shelf.
It really depends on the state of the screen. It's easier with reading PDFs, for instance, when you can get away with a full refresh on page turns.
Versus someone drawing on the screen with a lot of zooming and panning. People with the tablet would notice that when they stop a series of these actions that were back to back, the screen will "clean" itself after about 5 seconds of idleness.
Yeah, those panels are quite delicate, so they need a "maintainence" waveform(full refresh/flashing) for every now and then, to wiggle those stuck droplets.
Also when pushing for high refresh rate, you may need to use higher voltage, to make the droplets rise/fall faster. But sometime, those droplets are driven too hard and kind of stuck forever, so yeah, that's a trade off.
It's not that those steps are necessary to prevent damage, it's that those steps were traditionally necessary to maintain calibration of the individual cell states. Also...the first several generations used really slow graphics processors based on the premise that use cases didn't require fast refreshing.
eInk mostly fixed the calibration issue years ago before the first eink monitors came out, and most eink products these days use beefier graphics processors.
> It's not that those steps are necessary to prevent damage,
It is my understanding (but I'm not even remotely an expert) that e-paper panels can suffer from permanent display burn due to the charged ink particles sticking to the glass. The stock waveforms take this into account and prevent it from happening. However I'm not entirely clear on the low level details or if this only applies to some subset of panels or etc.
It seems like one of the design goals was separation/independence. It also doesn't need a battery if it is meant to be tightly coupled with the Steam Machine. Which is nice for opening it up to many alternate uses.
the part selection is appropriate for the current steam machine pricing, but i wonder if having this resource can help someone salvage eink displays from old kindles to achieve the same result.
I'd love to see an easy guide to doing this with the Framework Desktop form factor. I didn't buy any of the silly little squares for the front of mine since I figured I could 3D print some later, but six months in still haven't gotten around to it.
Same, but the front is important for airflow in the Framework Desktop, so I don't think covering it with an e-ink screen would work. But maybe with some space between the screen and the fan intake?
Yeah, it might need some kind of a riser to prevent airflow restriction. Of course, I suppose it depends on how many squares you cover.
The other idea I keep noodling about is creating modular gears and perhaps using a servo for a really cool dial indicator instead, but alas, it hasn't made it further than my ideas bin.
This is so cool! Coincidentally, I'm currently building something in a similar vein that pushes system metrics out to an Android app so an old phone or tablet can be used as a case screen. The app has widget plugins that expose a repo of metrics received and a GL surface, that can then be used to display fancy visualisations.
Check it out here: https://github.com/xfoa/humours. It's not finished yet, but the basic functionality works. It just has one widget at the moment that draws a spinning cube with temps, etc.
I would love to see an analysis of how valve's openness and goodwill affects their bottom line. Intuitively it should be a net positive for them, but there gotta be upfront costs, otherwise everyone would be doing it too.
1. Valve is a private company with a money printer (steam)
2. the point of these initiatives is to build an ecosystem with steam at the centre.
A better way to look at this is valve is trying to hedge it's self against microsoft. By creating an ecosystem of devices and software that's full open so they're not reliant on Microsoft. The goal of Valve hardware ISN'T to make money. It's to encourage others to build devices free of Microsoft that Steam can be installed on.
They have nothing to gain by being closed, and everything to gain by being open.
They have a money printer that gives them nearly unlimited flexibility. Being a private company means Gabe can do long-term investments without concern.
Steam has been an incredibly good steward of its position, but I fear for the day when capitalism finally sinks its claws into the platform.
Capitalism has nothing to do with short term greed.
Some CEOs are just too arrogant and think that optimizing for the short term won't hurt goodwill. That's their own failure. Capitalism says nothing about how a business should be run. It's merely defining the idea that humans who own things (capital) allocate their resources and keep the result.
I think they know it'll hurt goodwill. I think they don't think they have to care what other people think about them. I think they think they're too big to fail.
Valve is one of the most efficient (revenue/staff) corporations there is. Far more so than most tech companies even. If that's how you measure goodwill then it seems like it works.
> Valve is one of the most efficient (revenue/staff) corporations there is
Efficiency is not a word I would use when speaking about rent-seeking.
Landlord that 20 years ago bought some land that later became valuable and who is today renting it out is infinitely efficient as they are doing jack. And amount of respect they get is about equal to their economic output.
True but in the physical world a landlord has a monopoly over the parcel of land. Valve has a ton of competitors that seemingly get no traction and Steam is beloved.
No landlord owns entire planet. You never need to agree. If you want to open your store (=sell your game) you can always just rent or buy some other place that this landlord doesn't own. Like for example 150 kilometres away from here where you may get 2 visitors per day, sometimes there will even be humans.
Same with Steam. You are absolutely free to sell your game not on Steam. Except that unless you're a super massive giant selling highly anticipated game you might get no sales. But the choice to eat or starve is always up to you.
Is it even useful as a faceplate? An active display would be way more accurate at displaying hardware stats when the machine loses power (it'll shut down).
This screen is entirely independent, with its own power source, so unlike most bistable screens this one could also report when its connection with the Machine is lost, and in a different way than simply turning off.
> That's an interesting case of a display being off actually indicating something ("loss of power") which can't be replicated with a bistable screen.
My kindles usually show a dead battery graphic when I get back to them after a long time away... With enough power storage and the right trigger, this could be done.
Gamers Nexus did a very in depth review of the Steam Machine [1], which includes a comparison to a build yourself similar machine.
The result is that for about 70 dollars less you can put together a somewhat more powerful PC than the Steam Machine, but not for that form factor, it would still be bigger.
IMO, the Steam Machine is not a bad purchase if you are in the market for that type of product.
You can't build a machine which is as powerful, small, quiet, and cheap, nor can you take for granted that a machine you build can have a controller that can wake it from sleep, or which has HDMI-CEC (both are possible, but take extra work or hardware). You can rather easily build a machine with multiple of those attributes, but you'll have to pick ones to sacrifice in the name of the others.
The Steam Deck itself doesn't have an HDMI port, but the official dock does, and that does support HDMI-CEC (support was added to SteamOS a couple years ago). The Steam Deck also does support controller wake from sleep (added in the past year or so); I've actually seen people complaining about their Steam Decks waking up when they didn't realize that feature existed.
And all of the reviews I've seen about the Steam Machine talk about how well both of those features work.
It does not. Source: have a dock. Latest firmware installed from deck. And because the current Steam controller is a recent release, I had to try a whole mess of third party controllers before settling on PS5 controllers because everything else I tried had Bluetooth pairing issues / disconnects as you approached four controllers.
SteamDeck as a handheld is great plus or minus a few nits baked onto the power / battery life choices Valve made. SteamDeck -> TV and SteamDeck -> USB-C KVM are both workable, with caveats. I had hoped we would see the bug fixes you describe before the Steam Machine release. Alas, no.
I will say that the Deck has less than stellar bluetooth reception in my experience too. I settled on an 8bitdo controller because my XBox Elite couldn't stay connected from across the room. The Steam Machine has a dedicated antenna for Steam Controllers though.
Read the other replies, and i’ll restate that you are indeed confidently incorrect: i have been using this feature since the update that added it. i use the steam controller and i am using the original valve dock.
Especially since, afaik, you plug it in and it just works. No messing around with installing operating systems, setting up users (aside from signing into steam) or anything. It's essentially a console that plays PC games, but it's also a PC for the purposes of upgradability and ability to do other, non-console stuff with it
Compared to an average prebuilt? You can probably find large tower PCs at a lower price, but they'll likely have a low quality motherboard or power supply.
Compared to an average prebuilt that ships with Linux? Absolutely
I remember a few years ago when many custom PC cases had 5.25"-bay displays to control their fans / show temperatures. Some rackmount server appliances also make use of them
e-ink is becoming the new hotness lately. There may soon be a time when you will look at every poster or menu on a wall and wonder if it is paper or an actual e-ink screen that will soon change to some other image. Airports, highway signs, etc.
And of course it will be used for advertising, creating massive externalities for barely any income for the land owner, but they won't care because its others that pay
I think this site is from the UK where companies are plural (they are made of people after all). Is there some other grammatical issue you have... it is kind of meandering, but that's taste more than grammar.
It would have justified the price had they included this in the base model - this is the next best thing I suppose. Valve is really coming out as the good guy here in the video game industry and we should really support and applaud all that they're doing to hold the line for consumers and fans.
Yes but saying "it would have justified the price if they had included extra expensive things" is the same as saying "it should be cheaper". Sure, but stuff costs.
"Valve will not be making and providing their own e-ink display for the Steam Machine"
Too bad. The picture in the articles looks awesome. Like a device from some alternate reality. Neither retro nor the standard flat-panel LCD.
I don't want to mod a pre-build $1,049 device. I want it to be good our of the box and I'd rather pay more to get more. (If it was a $3K top-of-midrange machine, I would buy it in a second.)
You're not modding a pre-built $1049 device. The faceplates are removable and swappable with no disassembly needed, and this fancy one connects via bluetooth and is powered via a battery. Entirely non-invasive.
The thing is, Eink's waveform is kind of secret afaik, everyone has different tuning.
We had some secret eink sauce (propriety waveforms) to get the high refresh rates and colour contrast without a full flashing screen reset, but even then you need to run longer maintenance refreshes occasionally.
Pixels are just vertical columns of viscous fluid with charged ink particles. A waveform is just voltage changes over time to these columns to shift the particles up and down. More black to the top = darker shade of grey. Colour (in the gallery display, at least) is the same, just with each CMY particle group having different charges and responses to different waveforms.
Every once in awhile this vertical column gets messy with loose particles distributed through it (ghosting, muddy contrast) so performing a hard rail-to-rail voltage reset forces all the particles up and then down, and gives you a clean slate.
I have a question, hope it's not too sensitive, how do you guy protect your secret waveform ? One with enough tool and determination can just measure voltage at pixel and reverse the whole thing, the chinese can do that in less than a week i bet.
[1]: https://github.com/prashnts/betty-epd/blob/master/notebooks/...
But I was too lazy and/or uninterested to attempt low level tinkering with e-paper myself and these days you can finally purchase some reasonably(ish) fast panels off the shelf.
But still, that does not prevent one from measuring the voltage directly at pixel.
Versus someone drawing on the screen with a lot of zooming and panning. People with the tablet would notice that when they stop a series of these actions that were back to back, the screen will "clean" itself after about 5 seconds of idleness.
Also when pushing for high refresh rate, you may need to use higher voltage, to make the droplets rise/fall faster. But sometime, those droplets are driven too hard and kind of stuck forever, so yeah, that's a trade off.
Sounds like a battery, or maybe even a dishwasher.
eInk mostly fixed the calibration issue years ago before the first eink monitors came out, and most eink products these days use beefier graphics processors.
It is my understanding (but I'm not even remotely an expert) that e-paper panels can suffer from permanent display burn due to the charged ink particles sticking to the glass. The stock waveforms take this into account and prevent it from happening. However I'm not entirely clear on the low level details or if this only applies to some subset of panels or etc.
> Image update time - 25 ºC - - 4 - sec
I'm guessing you could probably push that somewhat by going beyond the specifications, would wager a guess how far though.
The other idea I keep noodling about is creating modular gears and perhaps using a servo for a really cool dial indicator instead, but alas, it hasn't made it further than my ideas bin.
Check it out here: https://github.com/xfoa/humours. It's not finished yet, but the basic functionality works. It just has one widget at the moment that draws a spinning cube with temps, etc.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/modos-tech/modos-paper-monitor/#...
https://www.crowdsupply.com/modos-tech/modos-flow#products
A better way to look at this is valve is trying to hedge it's self against microsoft. By creating an ecosystem of devices and software that's full open so they're not reliant on Microsoft. The goal of Valve hardware ISN'T to make money. It's to encourage others to build devices free of Microsoft that Steam can be installed on.
They have nothing to gain by being closed, and everything to gain by being open.
Steam has been an incredibly good steward of its position, but I fear for the day when capitalism finally sinks its claws into the platform.
Capitalism has nothing to do with short term greed.
Some CEOs are just too arrogant and think that optimizing for the short term won't hurt goodwill. That's their own failure. Capitalism says nothing about how a business should be run. It's merely defining the idea that humans who own things (capital) allocate their resources and keep the result.
Regulation can also break things if done incorrectly/poorly/inefficiently/corruptly.
Efficiency is not a word I would use when speaking about rent-seeking. Landlord that 20 years ago bought some land that later became valuable and who is today renting it out is infinitely efficient as they are doing jack. And amount of respect they get is about equal to their economic output.
Same with Steam. You are absolutely free to sell your game not on Steam. Except that unless you're a super massive giant selling highly anticipated game you might get no sales. But the choice to eat or starve is always up to you.
On the other hand, you probably don't want that glow of an active screen all the time. Status LEDs are annoying enough.
My kindles usually show a dead battery graphic when I get back to them after a long time away... With enough power storage and the right trigger, this could be done.
The result is that for about 70 dollars less you can put together a somewhat more powerful PC than the Steam Machine, but not for that form factor, it would still be bigger.
IMO, the Steam Machine is not a bad purchase if you are in the market for that type of product.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=66QzlDewigE
And all of the reviews I've seen about the Steam Machine talk about how well both of those features work.
SteamDeck as a handheld is great plus or minus a few nits baked onto the power / battery life choices Valve made. SteamDeck -> TV and SteamDeck -> USB-C KVM are both workable, with caveats. I had hoped we would see the bug fixes you describe before the Steam Machine release. Alas, no.
Bluetooth wake made available for LCD Decks in September 2025 (it was already available in OLED models) https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1675200/view/4983336...
I will say that the Deck has less than stellar bluetooth reception in my experience too. I settled on an 8bitdo controller because my XBox Elite couldn't stay connected from across the room. The Steam Machine has a dedicated antenna for Steam Controllers though.
If you have 2 or more controllers, you're often better off going with wifi dongles.
SteamDeck supports HDMI-CEC as of 3.7 ~2 years ago, using the original dock or select third party docks.
---
How to Enable CEC:
Press the STEAM button and go to Settings.
Navigate to the Display tab.
On the right side of the screen, find and toggle on Enable HDMI CEC Support.
Ensure Wake TV when device resumes from sleep is also enabled.
The steam controller would work just fine.
Valve supports SteamOS on other hardware.
For the same price I can get a prebuilt desktop PC with double the performance (Ryzen 7 5700 + RTX 5060 Ti)
Even if you go mini ITX you can get a better PC with 50% more performance (Ryzen 7 5600x + RTX 5060) https://pcpartpicker.com/forums/topic/498435-diy-45l-steam-m...
If you don’t care that much about size, HDMI-CEC or SteamOS there are faster alternatives for the price.
This is the real killer feature. So many people that I talk to know they want Linux, but are deathly afraid of installing it themselves.
Compared to an average prebuilt? You can probably find large tower PCs at a lower price, but they'll likely have a low quality motherboard or power supply.
Compared to an average prebuilt that ships with Linux? Absolutely
I remember a few years ago when many custom PC cases had 5.25"-bay displays to control their fans / show temperatures. Some rackmount server appliances also make use of them
"5.83inch E-Paper Display (G), E-ink Display, 648 × 480, Red/Yellow/Black/White, SPI Interface" https://www.waveshare.com/5.83inch-e-paper-g.htm?sku=32584
What would you suggest instead?
If we are talking past tense, "Valve have open-sourced.."
And if we are talking American "English," then "Valve has open-sourced..."
Too bad. The picture in the articles looks awesome. Like a device from some alternate reality. Neither retro nor the standard flat-panel LCD.
I don't want to mod a pre-build $1,049 device. I want it to be good our of the box and I'd rather pay more to get more. (If it was a $3K top-of-midrange machine, I would buy it in a second.)