Custom freewrite alternative with a raspberry pi

What is a freewrite?

For starters I should probably explain what a freewrite is so you know what I'm attempting to build as well as why I'm building it.

A freewrite is a digital typewriter made to be a distraction free writing station for all of your writing purposes. It achieves this by NOT being a pc, but more like a keyboard with a screen that has a perpetual text editor open. This way there are no apps, no browsing, no mails, not chat etc to distract you from the writing work you set out to do. On top of that, the screen is e ink which makes it a pleasant experience to look at for long period of times. It also makes for an extremely power efficient device and has an estimated battery life time of 4 weeks. This is especially useful when you have the traveler version so you can whip it out anywhere at any time and only need to worry about the words that goes on the page.

If this wasn't enough it also has sync to all major cloud options like google drive and dropbox, which makes it easy to build on your written ideas outside of the device.

The caveat?

Clearly there must be a caveat otherwise I would have just bought the device and went on with my day. And there is: The price. For the same price you can get the normal freewrite you could get the newest mac mini which is substantially better in all aspects. So it is very expensive and while I get why it has been priced the way it has, it is uncomfortably expensive, especially when like me you're aware of how low spec the device is. I haven't touched the device so I can't speak to the quality of it, but judging from the pictures the keyboard looks to be of similar quality as a low end laptop. So to me it seems that you're paying an exorbitant amount of money for the luxury of being distraction free on a low spec device with a sub par keyboard.

The plan: Build one myself

Being that I am a bit of a nerd I thought to myself, why not try to build one for myself, it can't be that hard. And while I might be blissfully ignorant on my skills, I do believe that I can overcome any obstacles I might find on my way. It should be said though that I have 0 experience with working on hardware, not even anything related to raspberry pie. Since I'm a web developer in my day to day life, any programming related to this project I will likely also enter with 0 experience.

Step 1

Buy a raspberry pi and an e-ink screen that is compatible

Step 2

Find and install a simple os on the raspberry pie

Step 3

Attach screen and connect keyboard

Step 4

Tinker with the os to get to a point equivalent of the freewrite

Step 5

Add obsidian as the text editor and connect it to google drive for syncing

Step 6

Make a housing for the unit so it can be foldable and portable

Step 7

Profit

Obstacles

Now it's likely that I am over optimistic and please do give feedback if you have any pointers for me. But the way I see it, this project should be doable. I do however think I'm going to run into issues with the following:

The Os

While it's fairly easy to get started with an os on a raspberry pie, just download and install it on an sd card and you're golden. However I'm not looking for "just an os", that would be way to "easy" and run counter to the idea of being distraction free text only device. So I would have to either heavily mod the raspberry pie os or make one from scratch. Which I suspect will span between extremely difficult to borderline impossible given my current experience.

The Hardware

While getting the screen, the raspberry pie itself and connecting them with my own keyboard should be fairly straight forward. Then even if I get the os running the way I want to, then just having dangly hardware hanging by the wires is of course not ideal. As I don't have a 3d printer nor any experience with cadding or sculpting 3d models, coming up with a functional way to combine it into one unit might be extremely difficult. I'd imagine this is also going to be where the money brought into this project will drown as hardware is expensive, especially when you're starting from scratch.

In conclusion

I will attempt to make an alternative to the freewrite using a raspberry pie with an e ink display and my own keyboard. The device should be foldable with a long battery life time and it should have an os that feels like a text editor. Ideally it's using obsidian as that's a text editor I really enjoy using. It should be able to sync to google drive.

Wish me luck as I will need it, and please do give me feedback and pointers as I've never attempted any thing remotely close to this project.