How Small Can an E-Reader Get?
The RSVP Nano is an ultra-small, DIY e-reader that flashes text one word at a time to fit an entire library in your pocket.
We have seen a lot of DIY e-readers here at Hackster News over the years, but none quite like the RSVP Nano. It is small enough to disappear into a pocket and be forgotten until it is needed, yet it manages to remain a practical reading device even with its tiny display. This is made possible using a technique called Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), where only a single word is shown to the user at a time. By rapidly updating the display, users can read as if a full page of text were in front of them.
Created by John Decebal, the RSVP Nano only requires a single component: a Waveshare ESP32-S3 High-Performance Development Board with 3.49-inch IPS Capacitive Touch Display. The name may be a mouthful, but the device measures just 92 × 34 mm. The onboard widescreen display has a resolution of 172 × 640, and it is touch sensitive. Equipped with an ESP32-S3 microcontroller, this platform is infinitely hackable, and that’s just what Decebal did to turn it into an RSVP Nano.
Getting used to RSVP may take some time, and if you want to look back to reference past text, you are out of luck, so this reader is not right for every use case. But for casual reading, especially when you are out and about and want to reclaim lost time, it looks like a winner.
Building your own RSVP Nano couldn’t be much easier. You’ll need the same Waveshare development board used by Decebal, then it needs to be flashed with the custom firmware. The firmware is freely available under an open source MIT license, and a web flashing tool is even available if installing a development toolchain isn’t your cup of tea. For those that want to poke around in the code or customize it, everything is available in the project’s GitHub repository.