alt Hacker NewsThere is an awesome YouTube video about this from the person who made it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nHbA2-_qzH4
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This link is way more interesting than the original ieee.
It was submitted to HN 2 times already but unfortunately it flew under the radar: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwa...
I was watching the video the other day, and my jaw dropped. Wenting is a display-technology beast. Watch his other videos too; he seems to be able to squeeze every last bit of possible performance out of every kind of display, and then some.
Wow, I'm glad to see that person is getting some more recognition for this work.
A claim in the video that I can't verify but makes economic/logistic sense is that the speed problem isn't the panels but the controllers. The current crop of controllers are optimized for low power, which fits the e-reader use case but that is not optimal for the interactive use case.
I found the video on YouTube before the IEEE article. It's a fascinating story.
Okay, that video is great.
Product questions that I couldn't find an answer to. From https://www.crowdsupply.com/modos-tech/modos-flow, I see "On the go, you can power Flow at up to 40 Hz with a single USB Type-C cable. At a desk, you can connect additional power and take advantage of its full 60 Hz refresh rate."
1) This surprises me a bit... is USB-PD incompatible with DisplayPort alt mode, or is this just based on an observation that display port devices tend to give limited power output?
2) Is every DisplayPort alt mode host able to give enough power to run at 40 Hz? In particular, can this be driven on the go directly from an iPhone?
3) Is that second USB port usable as a data port hubbed to the device when powering over the DisplayPort port?
4) I know it's possible to provide power from the display back to the host device when using DisplayPort alt mode -- when powering the display from the second USB-C port, is the connected device also powered?
The two use cases that would be super interesting to me is plugging this in to my iPhone or similar on-the-go, and plugging a USB-C keyboard into the second port on it for quick e-mails at the coffee shop and similar; and plugging this in to an iPhone, plugging my power bank into the monitor and keeping the monitor in high-power mode and the iPhone charging while working with a Bluetooth keyboard.
Obviously I don't expect it to handle these use cases out of the box, but... open source! This is really a question about what the hardware design is capable of, not the current software/firmware/FPGA capabilities.