As RAM prices surge and RAMageddon headlines multiply, Google posted new requirements for Android app developers earlier this week. Starting in 2027, apps distributed via Google Play must work within strict memory thresholds to “help protect the overall user experience from applications using excess memory and causing system-wide slowdowns.” 

The idea is to prevent a single misbehaving app from glitching the device, hogging RAM and degrading your entire smartphone experience. Not surprisingly, Google explicitly cited the supply shortage in memory — now a scarce, expensive resource amid booming AI demand — as one of the motivations behind the new rules. 

And these are rules, not just suggestions. Google threatens that apps that don’t comply “will be slowed down and may be terminated.” Compared with a lot of past updates, it also seems a pretty tight time frame for compliance. 

Far from punishing innovation, these rules codify what responsible development should look like — efficient memory use, faster launches and smoother multitasking experiences — and once they’re in the codebase, they might hang around for years. That means our phones may no longer slow down with every OS update. 

So, for everyday Android users, that’s a win: Not only could everything run better on today’s lower-end phones and computers, but it might also, hopefully, prolong the life of older hardware by slowing the upward climb in system requirements for upgraded software. And anything that runs well on low-end hardware generally runs faster and more smoothly on the best devices.

Who has the headache now?

Operating system and application developers have gotten accustomed to prioritizing what I think of as the most expensive common denominator — showy, resource-hogging features that highlight the high-margin devices manufacturers most want to sell, with lots of memory, storage and powerful processors. 

But the component supply crunch and skyrocketing prices have suddenly made low-end configurations of phones and computers critical to sustaining sales in those contracting device categories. 

The crunch is really for anything created in a semiconductor fab, though the effects are most visible in memory supplies and prices. Fab resources have been, or are expected to be, reallocated toward whatever’s ultimately most profitable. 

Right now, that means anything critical to AI, especially data centers. Memory producers and packagers can make a lot more money from high-bandwidth memory and SRAM for advanced processing rather than from the DDR incorporated into consumer devices. 

So there’s a lot more incentive for developers to optimize operating systems and application performance for less memory and lower-power hardware. Even if the memory shortage eases in 2027 (though that’s unlikely), the benefits of making our smartphones less sluggish should continue for some time.

RAM shortages affect Windows, too

Then there’s Windows. 

I can’t remember when it last ran decently with 8GB of RAM (and I’d love to know in what universe it can run on 4GB, the minimum requirement on paper). In March 2026, Microsoft finally announced it was taking Windows 11’s poor memory management seriously, “lowering the baseline memory footprint for Windows.” 

The company’s June update on its progress implied that part of the problem is the current interface framework applications are built with (WinUI 3), which rolled out in 2021, as well as the web components integrated into the OS (that’s why Edge is everywhere). 

After five years, shortages finally made it a Microsoft problem, not just a “you need to upgrade” solution.

It’s not completely fair to accuse the operating systems of resource bloat. MacOS and iOS only have to run on Apple hardware and have a far smaller application ecosystem to worry about, but systems like Android and Windows have to support a wide variety of hardware and an anarchic ecosystem of apps and games. 

That means a lot more overhead, including resources that must remain in memory to keep everything communicating. And to date, they’ve had the luxury of being able to back-burner, or at least deprioritize, efforts to make the OSes run more efficiently with less memory. 

Hopefully, no longer. When platforms start treating memory as a scarce resource and push developers to respect that scarcity, the result could be fewer surprise slowdowns and longer lifespans for existing devices. 

The AI irony

One of the reasons for the increase in memory requirements over the past few years has been the AI push. On-device AI features, such as local LLMs, image generation and advanced photo editing, require bursts of memory to run smoothly or to complete tasks with fewer errors. If ordinary apps are maxing out RAM, there’s no room for these features without constant throttling or crashing. 

Another irony? As demand for AI server memory pushes DRAM prices higher, we can’t afford or get the devices that companies have been pushing, and the models have been getting smaller as well.

Manufacturers have responded by incorporating less RAM or even cutting it in new phones. Google’s own Pixel 11 Pro base models, for example, drop from 16GB to 12GB compared to prior generations

Hardware prices might never return to pre-RAMageddon levels. But by squeezing waste out of everyday apps now, Google is carving out space needed for next-generation AI experiences on the same hardware. 

Lori Grunin

Senior Editor / Computers and Gaming Hardware

I’ve been reviewing hardware and software, devising testing methodology and handing out buying advice for more than 25 years.

See full bio

Advertisement

The fintech has joined a growing list of companies and banks pushing for a stake in the global stablecoin market.

Revolut has announced its first stablecoin, a euro-backed token called EURR.

The fintech commenced the phased roll-out of the stablecoin today (26 August), and said it will be first available to a “select group of customers” in Denmark, Poland and Portugal.

A broader launch across the European Economic Area is expected later this year, subject to product, operational and regulatory readiness.

EURR is issued by stablecoin platform Bridge – which was acquired by Stripe in 2024 – and is fully integrated into the Revolut retail app, according to the company.

The stablecoin is designed to maintain a value of €1, and is backed by reserves held and managed by Bridge.

Revolut said that EURR will give eligible customers a “euro-denominated, on-chain rail” to move between euros and crypto, and that the launch marks Revolut’s “next step in becoming a bridge between fiat [government-issued money] and crypto”.

“Revolut initially eliminated hidden fees and friction in currency exchange – now we are doing the exact same thing for crypto,” said Iman Olya, product owner of stablecoin at Revolut.

“EURR completely removes the pain of moving on- and off-chain, becoming a new seamless and instantaneous bridge between fiat and crypto.”

Revolut is the latest company to join the global stablecoin push, following the likes of fintech giants Stripe, Klarna and Visa, and numerous global banks.

While stablecoins have become more prevalent in the international financial landscape, the market is currently majorly denominated in US dollars, with European authorities making a push for euro-backed stablecoins to challenge US dominance.

“The growing argument is that to remain relevant, Europe must respond by promoting euro-denominated stablecoins of its own,” said Christine Lagarde, president of the ECB, at the Banco de España LatAm Economic Forum in May.

“Otherwise, it faces a future of digital dollarisation and a loss of monetary sovereignty.”

Earlier this year, AIB and Bank of Ireland joined a consortium of European banks – called Qivalis – working towards issuing a euro-denominated stablecoin to expand Europe’s financial infrastructure and compete with US-backed versions, which make up the overwhelming majority of stablecoins in circulation.

While stablecoins, once confined purely to crypto trading, have risen in mainstream popularity in recent years, statistics suggest that the popularity of the cryptocurrency may be slowing.

Statistics from DefiLlama show that the combined market value of stablecoins has levelled off in 2026, while data from Visa has shown that usage of the cryptocurrency has dropped this year.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

The $69bn company expects further disruption while it works to restore affected systems.

Boston Scientific’s global operations have been disrupted in a cyberattack on its IT systems.

The medtech giant said it discovered the breach on 25 August. “The incident has impacted access to certain operating systems and business applications, including the ability to process and ship customer orders,” it said in a statement published yesterday (26 August).

The $69bn company expects further disruption while it works to restore affected systems. A probe into the attack is ongoing, but no concrete timeline has emerged yet, it added.

The company said that it is unaware, as of yet, whether this incident might have any material impact on its business. Shares fell more than 3pc at market close yesterday and gained marginally in after-hours trading.

Boston Scientific employs around 7,000 across its three sites in Galway, Cork and Clonmel. The company’s Cork-based workers were asked to work from home yesterday, several news publications confirmed. SiliconRepublic.com has reached out to Boston Scientific for further information.

Boston Scientific is the latest target in a series of cyberattacks affecting pharmaceutical and medical technology companies.

Medical equipment manufacturing giant Stryker was hit by a cyberattack earlier this year that caused a global network disruption. Reports at the time suggested that the company’s Cork plant, which employs more than 4,000, was affected.

In April, Dublin recruitment platform Healthdaq – which is used by Northern Ireland’s health trusts – reportedly suffered a cyberattack from the relatively new hacker group XP95, which claimed to have accessed hundreds of thousands of files.

Several other medtech businesses, including Medtronic, West Pharmaceutical, Novo Nordisk, Amgen and Abbott Laboratories, have also reported cyberattacks in recent months.

A RunSafe report earlier this year discovered a marginal rise in cyberattacks on medical devices, with 80pc of those attacked reporting a moderate or significant impact on patient care.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Enterprises trying to feed PDFs, slides and scanned documents into AI pipelines keep running into the same wall: the tools either miss the structure — tables, charts, layout — or cost too much to run at scale.

Cohere released Parse 5 on Thursday, positioning it on price-to-performance, not raw accuracy — the right cost-capability mix for enterprise scale. Parse 5 is a 2.3-billion-parameter vision language model built to convert PDFs, slides and images into structured Markdown at enterprise scale. 

Cohere’s own published benchmark comparison puts Parse 5 behind three larger, general-purpose frontier models on accuracy. GPT-5.5, Opus 4.8 and Gemini 3.5 Flash all score higher than Parse on the three ParseBench dimensions Cohere reports. Cohere is not claiming the top score. It is claiming the best price for a score close to the top.The company priced the model at $1.50 per 1,000 pages through its API, with Model Vault, Cohere’s secure, single-tenant platform for managed inference, available for higher-volume deployment.

“Document parsing isn’t solved because the hard part isn’t reading text, it’s preserving structure and meaning,” Nils Reimers, VP of AI Search at Cohere, told VentureBeat. “Enterprise documents mix tables, diagrams, charts, and formatting that change the interpretation of the data. Most tools still drop structure or hallucinate content, and even frontier models break on layout‑heavy pages.”

Inside the single-pass architecture

Parse 5 takes a page as an image, runs it through a single vision-language model pass and returns structured Markdown, collapsing the OCR-plus-model pipeline most tools run as separate steps.

Architecture. It is a 2.3-billion-parameter vision language model built on Cohere Labs’ North-Micro-Vision-Instruct architecture, with an 8,192-token context window and roughly a 4.6-gigabyte footprint. It accepts a PDF, PowerPoint or JPEG page as a base64-encoded image and returns Markdown in reading order, with tables rendered as HTML, image descriptions and bounding box coordinates for tables and images.

Language coverage. Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish get stable accuracy, with lower-accuracy zero-shot support elsewhere.

Output modes. The default output returns a Markdown string per page. A blocks mode returns typed elements, where each table carries its own HTML, bounding box and description, the format Cohere positions as what makes citation-level traceability possible for agents.

Availability. Parse 5 is generally available now through the Cohere API, Model Vault, Microsoft Foundry and AWS SageMaker.

The benchmark shows a trade-off, not a win

ParseBench is a benchmark that scores document-parsing tools against human-verified enterprise pages. Cohere reports Parse 5 scoring 79.2 across three dimensions: tables, content faithfulness and semantic formatting. That puts Parse 5 behind GPT-5.5 (84.4), Opus 4.8 (84.3) and Gemini 3.5 Flash (81.8), and ahead of LlamaParse’s Cost Effective tier (78.3), Mistral OCR 4 (74.5), Databricks AI Parse (72.4) and Azure Document Intelligence (69.3).

Cohere’s table notes two excluded dimensions, Layout and Chart, and attributes both to product scope rather than a performance gap. Parse 5 returns reading-order Markdown instead of per-element bounding boxes for text, and describes charts rather than extracting their underlying data, with chart-data extraction planned for a future version.

Reimers said that design choice reflects where agentic workflows actually break.

“For charts, for example, we provide a general description of the chart together with an indicator, how Agentic AI can visually inspect the chart,” Reimers explained. “Other solutions try to extract the data from the chart, but then miss out critical information (for example, the color or the pattern of a line) that leads to hallucinations in Chat and Agentic AI applications.”

Cost is where Cohere makes its real case. Reimers pointed to a workflow the company modeled for a large financial services firm.

“We ran the numbers for a large financial services workflow that processes 750 million documents a year and showed that choosing Parse 5 over a large general‑purpose model like GPT‑5.5 would reduce costs by more than 98 percent.”

That figure is Cohere’s own estimate for a single modeled workflow, not an audited deployment.

Where Parse 5 sits against the field

There is no shortage of options for enterprises looking at parsing solutions.

General-purpose frontier models, GPT-5.5, Opus 4.8 and Gemini 3.5 Flash, top the accuracy comparison but carry the cost and latency of a large model on every page. 

Then there are specialized parsers, including Mistral OCR 4, LlamaParse and open-weight options like Chandra OCR 2 and RedNote’s dots.mocr.

Hyperscaler document intelligence services, AWS Textract, Google Document AI, Azure Document Intelligence and Databricks AI Parse, compete more on ecosystem convenience than on raw parsing quality, and score lowest in Cohere’s own comparison.

Kevin Petrie, VP of Research at BARC US, said document parsing sits at the center of enterprise AI adoption right now.

“We’re completing a survey now that shows document analysis is by far the #1 use case for AI, with 62% adoption rates among organizations we polled,” Petrie told VentureBeat. “Documents and other unstructured objects, including images and so on, hold the proprietary context that organizations need to differentiate their agentic AI initiatives.”

Petrie added that only time will tell how Cohere’s cost-performance stacks up against frontier models, but strategically his view is that Cohere has the right focus. 

Stephanie Walter, Practice Leader for AI Stack at HyperFRAME Research, sees Cohere Parse 5 as sitting in a good spot between legacy OCR and using an expensive frontier model on every page. 

“Its potential advantage is delivering structure, spatial provenance and private deployment at a price suitable for high-volume ingestion,” Walter told VentureBeat. “It does not need to win every benchmark. It needs to make reliable enterprise-scale parsing economical.”

The real test is downstream, not on the benchmark

“Parsing is the first quality gate in the enterprise AI stack,” Walter said. “If tables, headings, images, or reading order are lost during ingestion, better embeddings and larger models cannot recover that missing structure.”

A benchmark score isn’t the only input that matters here. “Enterprises should test parsers against their own most difficult documents and measure downstream retrieval and task accuracy, not how clean the extracted text looks,” Walter said. “The right question is not ‘Did it read the PDF?’ but ‘Can the agent now use the information correctly?’”

Keep an eye on the thermomoter.

Keep your MacBook within Apple’s temperature limits

Maksym Belchenko/Getty Images

Direct sunlight can make your MacBook’s screen harder to use

sergey causelove/Shutterstock

Use a hard surface and keep your laptop away from moisture

Burak Sür/Getty Images

Wisdom Audio is coming to CEDIA Expo 2026 with three new products aimed squarely at one of the fastest-growing and increasingly competitive segments of residential AV: high-performance loudspeakers and subwoofers designed to disappear into walls and ceilings or integrate cleanly with a room’s architecture. Custom installation audio has moved well beyond background music, with Monitor Audio, KEF, Sonus faber, Theory Audio Design, DALI, Lyngdorf Audio and other established high-end manufacturers offering increasingly sophisticated architectural speakers for stereo, multi-room audio and immersive home theater systems.

Against that increasingly crowded backdrop, Wisdom Audio will showcase three new CI products at CEDIA 2026: the Sage Series ICS3FR in-ceiling loudspeaker, the SUB2 passive subwoofer, and the Insight P3m series of customizable speakers and soundbars. The objective is not simply to hide the hardware; it is to deliver the kind of performance expected from a high-end music or home theater system while giving integrators considerably more freedom over placement, aesthetics and room design.

Wisdom’s ICS3FR, for example, uses the company’s planar magnetic technology in an architectural design, while the SUB2 was specifically developed to add low-frequency extension while maintaining a minimal visual footprint.

The ISC3FR

The ICS3FR is a “full-range” in-ceiling solution designed to provide an architecture-friendly, minimal-appearance installation while delivering high-resolution playback and matching 3-inch to 4-inch recessed round or square lighting fixtures.

The ICS3FR incorporates a Spiral Planar Magnetic Driver designed to provide ultra-wide dispersion, with a 120-degree circular coverage angle (-6 dB), and reproduce frequencies down to 40Hz using its 6.5-inch woofer. Its rated frequency response is 40Hz to 20kHz (+/-3 dB), with an F10 point of 30Hz (-10 dB), where meaningful bass output effectively ends. The ICS3FR requires no additional EQ or PEQ, only a high-pass crossover set between 35Hz and 40Hz.

The ICS3FR ships with everything required for 3-inch round or square and 4-inch round or square installations, as well as hard-surface and gypsum mounting. Custom-colored metal grilles and custom wood grilles are also available separately.

“The ICS3FR was created for projects where exceptional sound quality is essential, but the loudspeaker itself should virtually disappear into the architecture,” said Ron Rouse, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Wisdom Audio. “At its heart is our Spiral Planar Magnetic Driver, which provides the ICS3FR with best-in-class off-axis dispersion, delivering wide, consistent coverage and exceptional clarity throughout the listening area. Combined with its full-range performance, minimal-appearance design, and flexible grille and mounting options, the ICS3FR gives integrators an ideal solution for projects where outstanding sound and refined aesthetics are equally important.”

SUB2 Minimal Appearance Subwoofer

The SUB2 is a passive subwoofer designed to complement the Sage Series ICS3FR minimal-appearance loudspeaker and is available as an optional addition. It provides additional low-frequency support, extending bass response down to 37Hz through a 3-inch opening.

Its compact, minimal-appearance design also makes the SUB2 well suited for in-wall installations and other space-constrained applications where conventional subwoofer placement may not be practical.

Wisdom Audio Insight P3m Series

Separate from the in-ceiling Sage Series ICS3FR and SUB2, Wisdom Audio is also showcasing its new Insight P3m Series of customizable soundbars and individual loudspeakers at CEDIA 2026.

The Insight P3m Series includes the passive P3m-V vertical mono, P3m-C horizontal mono, P3m-LR stereo, and P3m LCR configurations. Each model can be custom-built in lengths or heights of up to 100 inches (2,540mm), with custom color options also available.

The P3m models use a Spherical Planar Magnetic Driver for high frequencies, extending down to 900Hz, while 4.5-inch woofers handle the lower frequencies.

The P3m Series also incorporates distinctive crescent-shaped woofer apertures that function as acoustic lenses. These help smooth the front baffle to reduce tweeter diffraction while making the two woofers behave as though they are positioned closer together. The result is improved dispersion, reduced interference through the crossover region, and greater low-frequency extension from the woofers.

Behind each aperture sits Wisdom Audio’s patent-pending Dual Helmholtz Resonator, which uses two slightly different tuning points to control unwanted resonances more effectively despite normal manufacturing variations. 

These technologies help flatten the woofer response, reduce distortion, improve speaker-to-speaker consistency, and deliver more uniform tonal balance across the listening area.

“With the Insight P3m Series, we set out to create a loudspeaker that delivers the performance people expect from Wisdom Audio while giving integrators far greater design flexibility,” said Ron Rouse, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Wisdom Audio. “Its customizable dimensions, color options, and multiple configurations allow the P3m to complement virtually any display or interior without compromising sound quality. We believe it is the ideal solution for clients who want exceptional performance in a beautifully integrated, highly versatile loudspeaker.”

Pro Tip: Detailed specifications have not been provided for the Insight P3m Series. The official product links (refer to our availability section) are expected to go live on August 26, 2026, which will include more detailed information and specifications.  Optional TV VESA mounts will be sold separately 

The Bottom Line 

Wisdom Audio’s new CEDIA 2026 lineup is aimed at integrators and homeowners who want high-performance audio without conventional speakers dominating the room. The ICS3FR and SUB2 stand out for delivering wide-dispersion, low-frequency-capable performance through extremely discreet ceiling openings, while the customizable P3m Series gives installers unusual flexibility in size, orientation, and finish. These are purpose-built CI products for premium stereo and home theater installations where sound quality, architectural integration, and aesthetics carry equal weight.

Price & Availability

The ICS3FR speaker and SUB2 are available through Authorized Dealers – consult dealer for pricing.  

The P3m-C, P3m-V,. P3m-LR, and P3m-LCR will be available through authorized dealers beginning August 26, 2026, starts in October 2026.

Related Reading:

Whoop has made screen-free wearables since its first proper release in 2015, but the shift in what Whoop considers itself to be about mirrors the change we see in the wider market. Today a Whoop band is made for just about anyone with the spare cash to pay for its $199 annual subscription. It’s a system to “help you improve how you sleep, train, and feel—starting day one,” to use Whoop’s own words. This couldn’t be further removed from the self-serious way Whoop described itself in 2015, as a “performance optimization system exclusively designed for elite athletes and teams.” What a change a decade makes.

Even if Whoop has always been grounded in the now-common concept of “training readiness,” things have altered drastically. So while it’s tempting to say Google’s Fitbit and company are playing catch-up with Whoop, that’s not quite it. It has homed in on the “low-distraction” lifestyle selling point just as the other bigger tech companies have.

On at least three fronts this can be attributed—or blamed—on AI, to some extent.

AI as the Good and Bad Guy

AI is a way for these wearable companies to upsell and make money, and on the other side, a major contributor to why a lot of us feel like we need low-distraction tech these days in the first place. While virtually every Whoop rival says it can be used without a subscription, some of these companies lean heavily on AI as an upsell.

Take Google and the Fitbit Air. Without a subscription, the app looks cute enough but is fairly spare. You get stats and charts, but if you want chatty explainers of what any of it means, you need Google Health Premium at $10 a month. Numbers and graph lines become paragraphs that reference specific quirks or events of the day because, to steal a line from humorist and podcaster John Hodgman, specificity is the soul of narrative.

And this is just the beginning. “The use of AI in monitoring and guiding health and wellness is still at the early stage of development but will likely become significantly more advanced as AI matures,” says Peter Richardson, vice president and cofounder of Counterpoint Research.

I find Google Fitbit’s chatbot ramblings quite annoying, with not-that-rare dips into the condescending, and I may even prefer the subscription-free experience. But my job has pushed me through the unenviable task of learning what VO2 Max actually means, what heart-rate variability trends indicate, and so on: not the norm.

AI could solve that long-standing issue with wearables—people glazing over data as soon as they see anything more than their daily step count. This AI use will be better represented on the phone than the watch screen, too, making the lack of screen a strength. It lets the AI shine.

Technostress

The most important influence of AI here is on the other side of the equation, though, as just the latest stage in the tech-ification of our daily lives. I’ve heard from multiple friends about how their recent work appraisals focused on higher-ups demanding greater AI use within their “personal workflow.” Perhaps you’ve had a similar experience.

Elizabeth Marsh, a doctoral researcher at the University of Nottingham who studies the dark side of the digital workplace, finds that digital tools consistently trigger a familiar cluster of harms: technostress, information overload, constant interruption, and blurred work–home boundaries.

Digital photos usually vanish into a folder the second you press the shutter. Maker Strange Inventions wanted a shot you could pull out of the camera, stand on a desk, and still overwrite later, so he built an instant camera whose film is a stack of tiny four-color e-paper cartridges.

You insert one of those small 3D-printed cartridges into the top of the compact body, press the red shutter button, and, assuming you’re within range, the Raspberry Pi 3 model A+ and the 5 megapixel camera module work their magic, reducing the scene to black, white, red, and yellow as the screen flickers to life before finally settling. Pinch the Game Boy-style release tab, slide out the cartridge, then insert a new one. E-paper has a nice side effect here in that it holds the image even when the battery is not in place, so each ‘film cartridge’ becomes a one-time, tangible photo that you may display or replace as needed.

Sale

Bambu Lab A1 mini 3D Printer + LED Lamp Kit, Ready-to-Use for Beginners

• A1 mini + LED Lamp Kit for Creative Light Projects: Bring your ideas to life with the included LED Lamp Kit. Simply print compatible lamp models and…
• The Perfect 3D Printer for Beginners: A1 mini 3D Printer is designed to make 3D printing easy from day one with automatic calibration, simple setup…
• Experience the Bambu Lab Ecosystem: Access MakerWorld’s huge library of ready-to-print models, manage prints through the Bambu Handy app, and enjoy…

All of the hardware is squeezed into a small 3D-printed enclosure, which includes a Raspberry Pi 3 A+, a Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 Wide, the quirky 1.54-inch 200×200, four-color e-paper display, and a battery pack to make the whole thing portable. In the early attempts, a frail ribbon held the display in place, but he soon replaced it with pin headers, which serve the same purpose while also keeping the cartridge firmly locked in. Headers are low-cost and effective. He did have some difficulty finding something springy to do the same job at first, but the idea of employing pogo springs was too expensive…in the end. Headers are excellent value and also serve to keep the cartridge in place, which is exactly the effect they were hoping for if ‘film’ was to feel like film. The entire contraption comes together without the need for screws, however he later added a little grab tab to make pulling the old cartridge out less like wrestling a ‘Game Pak’.

When you press the shutter, you get to choose from only four colors, which is a good for the Python script that reduces the raw captures and dollops to just those four colors, then lets you play with contrast, brightness, saturation, sharpness, and dithering until the image looks like it was meant to be that way on that small screen. Holding down the shutter button allows you to switch between a dithered and flat look. The poor old plants ripped apart at the seams since there was no green on the panel, but the maker’s hand, a toy car, a tape measure, a keyboard, and a spool of printer filament fared much better. Some subjects require additional resolution; for example, a window view was murky at 200 pixels.

In the end, he kept shifting through the six cartridges until he found a set that he was satisfied with enough to write on the screen. For the time being, he is letting them alone, and they appear like miniature works of art on their exhibition stand. The Strange Inventions Lab shop sells project files for €24, which contain the FreeCAD source file, STL files, electrical wiring diagram, complete parts list, Raspberry Pi software, modified e-paper driver, an image-processing test suite, as well as a shopping list and some basic build notes to get you started. The tough part is that you still have to source the Raspberry Pi, camera module, and all of the other components yourself. He used largely off-the-shelf boards for this prototype, but if you really want it to be as compact as possible, he’s recommended a custom PCB as the next step. Six images now sit on his display stand, waiting to be dusted off and replaced another day…