E-ink is supposed to be the electronic version of dead-tree paper, but there’s one enormous difference: how you get your images and text onto it. For paper, you print on it. E-ink? Well, it depends on what it’s hooked up to. If it’s an ESP32C3-based Xteink X4 and X3, then you can just print to that, too, thanks to [Nishant Joshi]’s fork of the popular CrossPoint firmware.

The fork implements the Internet Printer Protocol, IPP, on the ESP32-C3. It makes loading documents a breeze: select the printer in your operating system, and press print. To the computer, the reader advertises itself as a printer that provides monochrome, single-sided output at 300 DPI on A5 paper, and accepts Apple raster and PWG raster formats. Of course these raster images are enormous compared to the paltry RAM available on the microcontroller, so pixels are received and written row-by-row — both to the screen directly, and to the SD card for later perusal. That makes a folder on the SD card the equivalent of a printer’s output tray.

This interface is amazing in its simplicity, and we’d love to see it in other E-ink devices. It reminds us somehow of AlphaSmart word processors — which are still relevant today in large part because their ‘file transfer’ mechanism is to pretend to be a USB keyboard and type the document onto your computer. As long as IPP is available, so too will you be able to get documents onto this e-reader.

There’s a niche genre of text adventure that’s halfway between a traditional novel and a videogame. Think Zork if it had an extra few novels worth of words of well-crafted story to go with the action. [t0mg] is a fan of such adventures, and also quite enjoys carrying around his palm-sized ESP32 powered Xteink e-ink reader, so decided to create a project to merge the two interests, called eeink.

The Xteink readers have gotten popular lately because their modest internals and size make them very affordable. Not to mention hackable, since they’re basically an ESP32-C3 e-ink dev board that comes with a nice case and battery. The X4 Pro notably comes with an ESP32-S3 which means a lot more RAM, but this project targets both that and the X3/X4 that use the C3 version. Using the C3 means working within some rather stringent limits, as Xteink didn’t spring for any PSRAM, so [t0mg] had less memory to work with than folks did in the 80s.

This project is specifically focused on adventures using the scripting language ink, and comes with its own IDE called eenky to roll your own choose your own adventure book. It’s all on GitHub under an MIT license, and if you want to see it in action there’s a demo video embedded below.

Speaking of Zork, it wasn’t just the first commercial text adventure; it brought some important technological innovations, too.