Pocket Ink OS documentation

Welcome.

PocketInkOS is a small operating surface intended to serve as a foundation of components and primitives to interact with a e-ink device, providing minimalistic experience. It is a set of useful tools for productivity and entartainment that is very minimal and limited by design, but not by your imagination. PocketInkOS is extensible and free to use and currently available for download for WaveShare ESP32-S3-ePaper-1.54 Touch

Local tools

Built-in offline Apps

Built-in apps are local-first utilities. They should launch quickly, expose a limited surface area, and avoid requiring connectivity.

File Viewer

Opens and renders e-books, images, and plays music files from external storage. All decoders built from scratch and designed for low-power e-ink hardware.

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Keyboard component

Built-in keyboard widget with large 3x4 key grid that allows you to enter text from anywhere in the same way we used to do it on the old phones. PWR button switches the case.

1 .,?!/- 2 abc 3 def 4 ghi 5 jkl 6 mno 7 pqrs 8 tuv 9 wxyz * ERASE 0 _ + # OK
QR Encoder

Generates compact QR payloads in text, HTTP, or HTTPS mode, on-device, completely offline. Enter the text using the keyboard widget and get a QR code, or use as a library.

https://github.com/remixer-dec/PocketInkOS
Contact Links

Share your links quickly at networking events via QR and text.

Calculator

Touch calculator with expression entry, result display, delete, clear, and decimal handling.

Other apps

Calendar, TODO, Shaders, Paint, Deghost.

Offline games

Built-in offline Games

Every game is fully immersive, designed to be comfortably played with touch input, game state is saved before going into deep sleep and restored after waking up.

Chess

3 levels of difficulty, pvp option, touch auto-adjustment, fully feature complete.

Sudoku

Prodecurally generated 9x9 puzzles with various difficulty modes.

Minesweeper

5x5 board where you can reveal or flag mines; Switch the mode using the PWR button.

Pocket Wordle

Six-guess word puzzle with keyboard input and local multiplayer support.

Hangman

Word guessing game where you have to guess one letter at a time, has local multiplayer support.

Tic Tac Toe

3x3 board with CPU and player-vs-player modes.

Compile-time option

Optional Network Apps

Network apps are compiled when ENABLE_NETWORK_APPS is enabled. They add a Network menu category and provide a section of apps for interacting with the Internet.

Wi-Fi configurator

Connects to the configured network, displays connection state, and syncs device time.

Weather

Uses Open-Meteo API with configured latitude/longitude, presents current weather, next 24 hours, and weekly summaries with a focus on unsafe UV hours.

AI Chat

General purpose AI Chat Interface compatible with most Chat Completions providers with support for Audio Input

YCombinator Hacker News

Fetches Headlines of the top stories and displays them through the post feed UI.

Reddit

Fetches a compact post feed from preconfigured list of subreddits various sorting modes. May not work due to Reddit's network policy.

Highlights

Features

These are the main featues of the PocketInkOS shell.

Intuitive navigation

Having only two buttons and a touch screen, the input choices are limited, but are very intuitive in nature, since these buttons are in most cases used for the same purpose. For exceptions, overrides can be defined.

Status-bar

Only appears on the main screen and when you want to quit the app. Shows current time and battery status.

Deep-sleep clock

By default the device goes to into deep sleep after 2 minutes of inactivity. During deep sleep it shows current time, every minute it wakes up for a second to seamlessly update the displayed time.

External apps

The firmware supports running external separately compiled apps from the SD card and showing them in menu. Demo 'Tetris' app is provided.

Quick Settings control panel

Can be shown from anywhere via a long press on the PWR button. It allows to reboot/shutdown the device, toggle wifi, bluetooth, cpu clock speed, adjust volume levels and more.

Partial Screen Refresh

The screen of the target device does support partial refreshes and PocketInkOS takes full advantage of it, providing faster response time and pleasent hover effects.

Unsupported

Limitations

These features are not yet supported and may not work.

UTF-8 Text Rendering

Currently all displayed text is limited to ASCII and ASCII-based icon fonts.

Release

Download

Download the latest firmware and documentation archive below.