The editorial argues that Valve deliberately designed the e-ink panel as a generic USB HID peripheral with no signed firmware check, no handshake, and no SteamOS lockout — it works on a Raspberry Pi or Framework laptop out of the box. Combined with permissive MIT/CERN-OHL-P licensing and two prior open-source drops (controller mount, thermal CAD), this signals a consistent posture of treating the Steam Machine as a reference design, not a proprietary console.
The GamingOnLinux writeup, surfaced on HN with 541 points, frames the release as Valve enabling anyone to make their own — emphasizing the completeness of the drop (KiCad schematics, board layouts, STEP files, STM32 firmware, Rust reference daemon) and the permissive licensing that allows fabrication, modification, and resale.
The editorial argues Valve can afford this posture because it takes a 30% cut of a $50B+ storefront and doesn't need hardware margins — the Deck, Index, and Machine break even or lose money to keep Steam sticky. Open-sourcing peripherals is cheap insurance against a future where SteamOS forks like Bazzite gain traction, since Valve wins as long as the storefront stays central regardless of who ships the hardware.
Valve published the complete hardware and firmware package for the small e-ink display that sits on the front of the upcoming Steam Machine. The drop, mirrored on GamingOnLinux and picked up on Hacker News (541 points), includes KiCad schematics, board layouts, STEP files for the enclosure, and the STM32 firmware that drives the panel over USB. The license is permissive — MIT for firmware, CERN-OHL-P for the hardware — so anyone can fabricate, modify, or resell the design.
The panel itself is unremarkable hardware: a 2.13-inch monochrome e-ink module, an STM32 microcontroller, a USB-C interface, and a small button matrix. What matters is that Valve treated it as a generic peripheral rather than a Steam Machine accessory. It enumerates as a standard HID device. There's no handshake, no signed firmware check, no lockout if you're not running SteamOS. Plug it into a Raspberry Pi and it works. Plug it into a Framework laptop and it works.
The repo also ships a reference daemon written in Rust that reads system stats — CPU, GPU, current game, download queue — and pushes them to the display at ~1 Hz. It's about 800 lines. The wire protocol is documented in a single markdown file.
This is the third piece of Steam Machine hardware Valve has open-sourced in the last six months, following the controller mount schematics and the thermal solution CAD. The pattern is consistent: Valve is publishing the Steam Machine as a reference design, not a proprietary console. That's a genuinely different posture from Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo, where the hardware is the moat.
The economics only work because Valve doesn't need to sell hardware at a margin. Steam takes a 30% cut of a $50 billion+ storefront. The Steam Machine, the Steam Deck, and the Index all lose money or break even at the BOM — they exist to keep the storefront sticky. Open-sourcing the peripherals is cheap insurance against a future where a fork of SteamOS (Bazzite, ChimeraOS, HoloISO) becomes the dominant Linux gaming distro and Valve wants those users to still buy Steam Machine-compatible accessories.
The HN thread's most upvoted comment cuts to it: "This is Valve doing what Nintendo would sue you for." A reply from a Framework engineer notes the panel would be trivial to integrate into a laptop lid — the STM32 firmware exposes a simple frame-buffer command set, and the power draw is under 20 mW in refresh, effectively zero at rest. There's already a fork on GitHub adding a driver shim for Windows.
Compare this to the last decade of console peripherals. Every Xbox controller ships with a proprietary wireless protocol that requires a licensed dongle. PlayStation's DualSense adaptive triggers are undocumented — the community reverse-engineered them. Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons drift because the analog stick module is a cost-optimized part no one outside Nintendo can source. Valve just handed you the BOM.
The interesting technical detail is the display driver. Rather than the usual proprietary blob from the e-ink vendor (typically Waveshare or Pervasive), Valve reimplemented the waveform tables in firmware and published them. E-ink waveforms are historically the most jealously guarded part of the stack — they determine refresh speed, ghosting, and panel lifetime. Publishing them is the kind of move a company only makes if they've already negotiated the licensing or don't care.
If you build hardware, the schematics are worth reading even if you'll never touch a Steam Machine. The USB-C power delivery negotiation, the STM32 boot-loader design with A/B firmware slots and rollback protection, and the JTAG debug header pinout are all textbook-clean reference implementations. The board is 4-layer, hand-routable, and uses only jellybean parts you can buy from LCSC in quantity 1. It's the kind of design a senior EE would use to teach a junior — which is presumably intentional.
If you build Linux desktop tooling, there's a smaller opening. The reference daemon is a good excuse to add a "secondary display" surface to your app. Discord, Spotify, and OBS have all had "stream deck-style" secondary display asks in their issue trackers for years. A cheap, open, well-documented panel with a Rust reference implementation lowers the barrier for third-party integrations. The first person to ship a Prometheus-metrics-to-e-ink daemon will get a lot of GitHub stars.
If you're a game developer, the practical implication is that any surface Steam exposes on the Steam Machine is now a surface every SteamOS-flavor distro can expose. That includes the panel API. Games that want to show download progress, achievement unlocks, or Discord notifications on the front-panel display can target the same API on Bazzite as on SteamOS. That's a small win — but it's the first time a console-adjacent display surface has been portable across distros.
Valve is running the same playbook it ran with the Steam Deck: subsidize open hardware, let the community port everything, and quietly become the default. The Steam Deck's success wasn't the hardware — it was Proton and the decision to make SteamOS a real Linux distro instead of a locked appliance. The Steam Machine looks like it wants to be the living-room extension of that bet, and open-sourcing the peripherals is how you signal you mean it. Expect Framework, System76, and half a dozen Chinese ODMs to have compatible panels on sale before the Steam Machine itself ships.
In case you're wondering and don't want to click around, the display is a standard Adafruit 5.83'' eInk panel: https://www.adafruit.com/product/6397
I'd love to see an easy guide to doing this with the Framework Desktop form factor. I didn't buy any of the silly little squares for the front of mine since I figured I could 3D print some later, but six months in still haven't gotten around to it.
the part selection is appropriate for the current steam machine pricing, but i wonder if having this resource can help someone salvage eink displays from old kindles to achieve the same result.
This is so cool! Coincidentally, I'm currently building something in a similar vein that pushes system metrics out to an Android app so an old phone or tablet can be used as a case screen. The app has widget plugins that expose a repo of metrics received and a GL surface, that can then be used
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I wish more hardware companies treated these kinds of optional add-ons as something the community can run with instead of either productizing them badly or locking them away completely...