TL;DR: de-link is now Silkscreen, and the new website is ready for you to explore including an interactive builder where you can choose your parts and see what they cost. My first 30 boards are expected Friday, October 2, and I’ll test them before sending out the contributor batch. There are 15 closed-beta spots still open for people who want to help with firmware, testing, cases, or documentation. Just want a reader? A 125-kit open beta is planned afterward. For now, poke around the site, tell me what’s confusing, and hold off on ordering boards until I confirm the design works! Come back to read the whole thing later at kit.silkscreenreader.com​

Allow me to re-introduce myself, the same way that de-link is re-introducing itself as Silkscreen.

My name is Ian. I'm 24 years old, two years out of college, and I am not very well read. I skipped books for a lot of my life, and my fondest memories of books came when I was in grade school - incredibly curious and incredibly ignorant to the world around me. For that reason, I was always big into non-fiction. I vividly remember putting off the idea of fiction because "why would it apply to me?" and I guess that cascaded into my later years as I struggled to get through literature classes without Sparknotes.

"I'll be honest, Mr. Horton. I didn't read that book at all." I boasted to my AP Lang teacher, referring to Brave New World. It was the end of the school year with the gradebook settled and no way to re-grade my assigned essay that I handed in four months ago. I thought I was getting away with something, until he replied back to me.

"I know you didn't read that book, Ian." he said, deadpan. At the time, I thought this was hilarious. I'd figured out how to get an A without getting much out of the book. At the time, I thought that meant I'd won.

Years later, with an engineering degree under my belt and no English class taken in years, I had very little incentive to analyze what he said to me and as a result I wasn't doing any more reading to that point. Still, I thought e-ink was really cool, and I was in need of a side project. So I started to build a reader myself.

And to make a long story short, everyone seemed to build along with me. XTEink devices proved the concept that cheap and pocket-size reading had an audience. Crosspoint refined it by allowing the community to squeeze everything it could out of these cheap devices. People made cases, firmware, reading lights, anything they could to improve one facet of their user experience with a tiny e-ink screen.

All of a sudden, the open source hardware initiative I put in front of me with this project started to make more and more sense to me, even as I ran into challenges at every step, every design decision, every supply chain issue, every piece of community feedback, every new device made by companies with far more resources than me.

It was hard not to ask myself why I was still doing this when other people could make readers faster and cheaper than I could. But I saw the passion in this community. People were already making the things they wanted their readers to have. I kept thinking: what could they do if the circuit board itself was something they could work on, too?
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​So anyways, here is Silkscreen: https://silkscreenreader.com

Or at least, here's my website. It has everything you could want to know about this project, from the "why", to the "how", to the "how much", to the "what's next". Please have a poke around: explore the board, try the builder, and see whether it answers the questions you have about the project. If not, please let me know!

The full device shown on the page is only a mockup of the final case we'll be developing through the closed beta. But the idea is there, and it encapsulates the board underneath.

Everything from de-link, refined and re-worked for cost saving, power saving, optionality, modularity, and community advancement. At its core, your interface for e-ink panels, the ESP32 itself, glorious USB-C, high speed 4-bit SD card interfacing, and charging/protection for LiPo batteries. The rest is... what you want. Okay, that's a bit of a loaded promise, but it's the overall goal I want to see people achieve with their build of Silkscreen.

Here are the features you are free to omit from your board for the sake of saving some dollars and cents:

• Frontlight - If you don't want lighting, you can leave the light-driving circuitry off. Or you can use an unlit screen and keep that circuitry and the accessory header for a future external light. A lighted case could then run from the board instead of needing its own coin battery. That's something I'd love to see someone build!
• Touch - I know, I don't like touch either. You can omit this too, you have all the buttons in the world if you prefer those.
• Buttons - if you're a touch person, you can also omit some navigation buttons!
• Clock - clock components are weirdly expensive, so I made it easy to leave it off if you're not one to check the time while you read.
• Development/accessory header - if you don't want to debug or otherwise connect compatible accessories the community might make later, you can leave this off too

You can see this in action with the interactive app on my website, click "Build One" on the homepage!

The idea is a reader with the combination of features you actually want: frontlight, touch, buttons, and room for compatible accessories people might develop. The design is open, and you can have the circuit board assembled by a service like JLCPCB or tackle the soldering yourself.

The board design is ready for its first real tests. Now we need to prove it works, get the software running on it, and build a case worth putting it in.

Like I said before, the case shown on the site is a mock up. It does not exist for anything but a concept. The 3D enclosure for de-link was something I took months to make, and it wasn't great. This leads to the next step: the closed beta.

The Silkscreen prototype will be in my hands soon, and the plan is to get boards into 25 other people's hands once I've checked them. Maybe even yours!

I ordered 30 boards, and they're supposed to come in by this Friday, October 2nd. They're all fully assembled with every module except the clock, and it's up to me to validate that the board works just as intended. After that, 25 of them are being shipped to makers in my community to help flesh it out, make the enclosures, and test it to their heart's content.

Again, there are more details on the site, but as I speak now I have FIFTEEN openings still needing to be filled. So please, email me at [ian@silkscreenreader.com](mailto:ian@silkscreenreader.com) with:

• Your name or online name
• Your location
• Your experience or projects
• What you might want to work on

I'll add you to a list, and you'll be able to purchase a board from me for $30 plus $5 shipping and applicable tax. These first boards are for people who want to help develop and test Silkscreen. If you mainly want a reader to use, I have plans to expand my previous "group buy" plans into an open beta once I have an enclosure made and some logistics worked out!

For those who want Silkscreen early and don't mind building their own, I plan on releasing build files and tutorials as soon as I validate its design! So even if you miss out on the closed beta slots, you can still participate! Closed beta or not, if you want to build your own eventually, I'd highly recommend buying the battery and screen panel options for your build. These links are on my website at the end of the "Build One" application. Wait for the validation update before placing orders based on the new design. You can bookmark the page and come back to your design later.

This is a major step for Silkscreen, and I really hope this next one is quicker than the last. I would really love to have a cohesive system where people can get one without needing to figure out every step for themselves, whether they want to build their own or put together a kit. Your feedback is a big part of getting there. I know what I mean when I look at this board or use the website, but I've also been staring at both for far too long. I need to know whether they make sense to someone who hasn't.

So that's my next step for you, casual reader. Check my website, tell me if it makes sense to you. Before I bring it to the wider Reddit audience, try the builder, explore the board, and tell me where you get confused. You've followed the messy process of getting here; now I want to know whether the result actually explains itself.

And if you want to get in on the action before it's refined, either chime in for the closed beta, bookmark the build resources for when they're ready, or refer to my refreshed GitHub page: https://github.com/iandchasse/silkscreen-pcb where I have documented the design of this new board and its quirks/features. Please hold off on ordering boards from those files until I've tested the design in my hands. I'll post an update when it's ready to build.

My next steps are: test the boards, get the contributor batch out, and work with the beta group on the firmware, enclosures, and build instructions. Alongside that, I'll be refining the website, putting together the public introduction, and working through the logistics for the open beta.

Thank all of you, so very much for your support to this point. I don't take it for granted in the slightest, and I hope I can live up to the hype that follows this project.

And most of all, I really, really, really, really, want to start reading again.

Thank you for reading, and thank you for reading.

Ian, former creator of de-link, current creator of Silkscreen

🎤