July 3, 2026
Ink drama on the front panel
Valve open source the Steam Machine e-ink screen so you can make your own
Valve hands fans the blueprint after people begged for this screen to come built-in
TLDR: Valve released the plans for the Steam Machine’s fancy front screen so fans can build their own, instead of selling it ready-made. Commenters are torn between praising Valve for sharing and grumbling that a premium machine should have come with the cool display already attached.
Valve just tossed PC tinkerers a shiny little gift: the company has open-sourced the plans for the Steam Machine’s front e-ink display, now cheekily named the “Inkterface.” In plain English, that means Valve isn’t selling the screen itself, but it is giving people the recipe so they can build one and attach it to the front of the device. And the comment section immediately turned into a mix of cheerleading, nitpicking, wish-listing, and mild wallet pain.
The loudest reaction? A split between “Valve is the last good guy in gaming” and “cool, but why wasn’t this included in the first place?” One commenter said the screen would have helped justify the already hefty price, while another basically sighed, “I don’t want to mod a prebuilt $1,049 machine, I want it to look that good out of the box.” That’s the central drama: fans love the move, but some are side-eyeing Valve for turning a dream feature into a DIY project.
Meanwhile, the hobbyist crowd showed up fast. One person helpfully dropped the exact Adafruit display link, while another begged for a version that fits a Framework Desktop. And of course there was the classic “look what I’m building” energy, with one commenter plugging their own old-phone-as-case-screen project. The vibe is half admiration, half “someone please sell me this prebuilt already,” with a sprinkle of this machine now looks like it escaped from a cooler alternate timeline.
Key Points
- •Valve has open-sourced the Steam Machine e-ink display project instead of selling an official display itself.
- •The project is hosted on Valve’s GitLab and released under the MIT license.
- •Valve now refers to the display project as the “Inkterface.”
- •The article lists the required build components, including Adafruit ESP32 and e-ink hardware parts.
- •JSAUX has said it still plans to offer third-party “Ink & Pixel versions” of the display.