Valve open source the Steam Machine e-ink screen so you can make your own
364 points - today at 1:01 PM
SourceI 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...
jagged-chisel
today at 5:02 PM
If we can’t extract all the value, no one can.
In case you're wondering and don't want to click around, the display is a standard Adafruit 5.83'' eInk panel: https://www.adafruit.com/product/6397
whatisthiseven
today at 3:02 PM
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.
mrheosuper
today at 4:44 PM
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.
fc417fc802
today at 5:37 PM
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.
birdsongs
today at 6:10 PM
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.
Out of interest, what (vaguely) is the amount of time you need between maintenance refreshes?
Rebelgecko
today at 3:57 PM
Partial refresh on these can often be surprisingly fast, even when full refresh takes seconds
The datasheet says 4 seconds for the image update time. However, I didn't found the time for partial refresh.
Probable seconds per frame at least.
darksim905
today at 5:02 PM
so probably waveshare or some other ODM? got it.
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.
BunsanSpace
today at 5:43 PM
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.
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.
moffkalast
today at 4:59 PM
They have an infinite money glitch in Steam, it hardly matters for them even if it makes a loss as long as it propagates the ecosystem.
3eb7988a1663
today at 5:01 PM
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 finally sinks its claws
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.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS
today at 5:04 PM
Capitalism doesn't break things, it builds them. You're thinking of greed, which exists in all economic types.
Root_Denied
today at 5:34 PM
Unregulated capitalism breaks things for sure. That regulation can stem from government intervention or private ownership (or both).
Regulation can also break things if done incorrectly/poorly/inefficiently/corruptly.
anticorporate
today at 1:46 PM
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.
phren0logy
today at 2:29 PM
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?
A little e-ink status tile for temps, build status, now playing, or just a static label would be much more interesting than most decorative inserts
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.
The main thing I'd worry about is long-term reliability
Hold on , i gotta recharge my front plate
orbital-decay
today at 3:34 PM
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).
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.
On the other hand, you probably don't want that glow of an active screen all the time. Status LEDs are annoying enough.
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.
It's own power source... Let me guess, solar cells? Batteries? A separate power plug?
Just a lithium battery.
Now I wonder how it gets recharged.
"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.
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
Is the Steam Machine a decently priced desktop compared to the "generic" ones?
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.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=66QzlDewigE
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.
I like the SteamDeck I have, but it doesn't do HDMI-CEC or controller wake from sleep today. Valve needs to prove the Steam Machine doesn't fail here.
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.
You are confidently incorrect.
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 only thing you might lose by building your own and running SteamOS is HDMI-CEC.
The steam controller would work just fine.
Valve supports SteamOS on other hardware.
Compared to buying from parts? No.
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
artisinal
today at 2:32 PM
For a small gaming box it is a good price.
If you don’t care that much about size, HDMI-CEC or SteamOS there are faster alternatives for the price.
hamdingers
today at 6:00 PM
If you do care about SteamOS, any machine with a reasonably recent AMD GPU will run SteamOS or a similar distro just fine.
voidUpdate
today at 2:35 PM
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
>No messing around with installing operating systems
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.
giancarlostoro
today at 2:30 PM
[dead]
westurner
today at 2:27 PM
Looks like Waveshare has a E6 full color ePaper/eInk/EPD display in 3.6" and 7.3" but not yet in 5.83":
"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
p2edwards
today at 4:47 PM
Full color, except for certain shades of blue
Supports full color (images of the German flag)
Clickbait, I want to make an actual eInk display myself. Not just buy one from Adafruit.
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.
voidUpdate
today at 1:53 PM
Given computer part prices recently because of new datacenters, I think the price is already justified, as they don't want to sell it at a loss
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.