This technical portfolio project advocates for free access to knowledge and creative information-sharing through open-source documentation and code. The content champions Article 19 (free expression/information) and Article 27 (scientific/cultural participation) by publishing detailed instructions and enabling community contribution. However, embedded analytics tracking without transparent consent mechanisms slightly undermines privacy protections (Article 12) and non-discrimination principles (Article 2).
I love using Kindle's as single purpose tablet/interfaces/displays. I'm the weirdo who actually prefers the LCD displays vs eInk and it's incredibly easy to set Kindle Fire's into dev mode which lets you display a webpage, never turn off while connected to power and never show ads.
You can regularly find the Kindle Fire HD10s for ~$40
I was glad to see the note about battery life down at the bottom. My biggest challenge with the old Kindles I have laying around is that most of them won't hold a charge!
As someone who worked on kindle power consumption many years ago: One of the (by far) biggest consumers of power is the WiFi connection. It has to wake up and respond to the AP in order to not get disconnected every x seconds.
Off the top of my head, I think 'on' average power consumption was ~700uA without wifi, and about 1.5mA+/- with Wifi. This is from over a decade ago, so my memory is fuzzy though...
Obviously, page changes used relatively large amounts of power. I don't recall the exact amounts, but it was 100s of mA for seconds.
There is also an "every x pages, do a full screen refresh (black to white)" to fix up the ghosting issue that the article writer saw.
I made something like this! Except I have it plugged into an outlet in the kitchen, so no battery to deal with. It's a little hacky but it works for me.
This is great! I love seeing e-ink/Kindle related displays. I thought I saw a HN article about it 'awhile ago', turns out, time flies, that was back in 2024!
A while ago I've rewritten TRMNL's Kindle-client from Bash into Lua, optimised it a bit and when doing a refresh every 5 minutes, my Kindle Paperwhite 10th gen now lasts about 5-6 days on a charge.
I took an even simpler route. After jailbreak and ssh I just made two scripts on the Kindle, one is triggered every minute, the other every half hour. Both draw the same image from the same location, the 30 minute one just adds a full refresh. This way the display is not fully refreshed every minute, but in time image is degrading so full refresh once every 30 minutes seems work out fine.
This way Kindle has a very simple job, no apps installed no anything, just two extra cronjobs to run the oneliner bash scripts that draw the image. And I use rsync from a raspberry pi to push a new image every minute. That image is assembled with a python script, rpi side, with air quality data. Connects to local mysql server, pulls the values and then assembles it.
This is the kind of project that makes me want to raid the drawer of old electronics. The power consumption breakdown from hex4def6 is really valuable context too - wifi being the dominant power draw explains why so many of these e-ink dashboard projects end up with a Pi doing the heavy lifting over USB.
I've been thinking about similar setups for kitchen recipe displays. E-ink is perfect for anything you glance at - no backlight burning your eyes at 6am, and the always-on nature means you don't have to wake up a screen. The trade-off of slow refresh is actually a feature when your data only changes every few minutes.
I rebuilt the OneBusAway iOS app from scratch as a pair of Swift frameworks that will work anywhere, including tvOS[1].
Then, I started a new project to rebuild the OneBusAway server in Golang from scratch[2].
Then, I got an intern to build a suite of fantastic SDKs on top of Stainless[3].
Finally, I got Google to pay for an intern last summer to build a sign mode UI in SvelteKit that will work in any browser[4].
Easy!
But seriously though, if your transit agency isn't so cool that they provide GraphQL endpoints to query transit information, I think you'll find that the OneBusAway Maglev server is an incredibly easy way to consume your transit agency's scheduled and realtime data, and that our SDKs and apps are a fantastic way to visualize all of that information.
We're always looking for software developers to help out with our projects, as well as folks in disciplines ranging from user experience and product management, to biz dev and marketing, to volunteer some time to help our underfunded open source projects succeed. Feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] if that sounds interesting to you. Our software is used by millions of people every day in cities all around the world, including Seattle and New York City.
In Queensland, Australia we have solar powered e-paper displays [1][2] at some bus stops that are very similar to this (much bigger than a kindle screen, though).
Old kindles are a lot of fun. I've turned a couple of them into AI generated paintings that refresh their contents every few hours or so. I can control the prompts via web-ui, through template functions they can include things like weather conditions, random animals, countries, current date & time and even titles of random news articles. Prompt handling and image generation is done completely locally on my home server, using ollama and stable-diffusion-webui.
The only problem I've had is that most news articles from mainstream media are damn depressing, so generating paintings directly from them gets gloomy quick. I had to instruct ollama to try put a positive spin on negative articles. I do love my weather-forecast painting though. Whenever it's raining outside, the painting has rain in it too (or now during winter it's all snowy).
Battery life is really good too, lasts several weeks. I used existing "Online Screensaver extension" from MobileRead forums, with some customizations. It automatically turns on airplane mode after fetching the image and keeps it on until next fetch, which probably explains the improved battery life.
Real nice! Shutting down networking between refreshes definitely helps with the battery life. I also prevent mine [1] from updating between 10PM and 6AM. Nobody is looking at it anyway. If you search around on Github for Kindle dashboards, there's a lot of scripts out there with a bunch of battery life improvements (shutting down daemons, wifi etc.).
I built GTFS based public transit display on top of a Raspberry Pi Zero and a 2" e-ink display ~10 years ago [2].
These days digital shelf labels look like a really cheap option; lots of them look like they require a proprietary base station, but there are some out there with BLE/NFC - have been meaning to get one to try.
Of course, if you have an old kindle about, reusing it is a great way to avoid waste.
Everybody seems to do stuff like this nowadays. Myslef included. I did have old K4NT lying around and started playing with it. With a little bit of help of AI (not for jailbreaking though! - lots of nonsense) I was able to put up little server, which now serves family calnedar agenda, but it is designed to be modular and I will put more stuff to it later. I've even designed and 3D printed insert into Ikea 12x18 frame and put a small "blade" powerbank with MagSafe to the back, so now I need to push powerbank button every 5 days. Internal battery is in a bad shape now, but I saw I can still buy an replacement. Wired version was not an option in my case.
Here's my version of a kindle dashboard I set up several months ago (https://github.com/thekakkun/kiiin). I use it to show local weather data and music data from my media server.
As for the "color bleed" (I assume it's ghosting) you mention, periodically using `eips -f` when drawing the image to force a full screen redraw should help.
Good to know about Kindle Fire. And hah, I can totally see why you'd prefer LCD's over e-ink - no ghosting + readable in pitch dark would be a sweet upgrade to the dashboard.
Yeah that was definitely a worry of mine before I booted it up. Luckily it's still got decent battery life. We'll see how it holds up in 6 months...
Dyson vacuums and Kindles are not the same whatsoever, but I wonder how easily it'd be to swap out the battery on an older Kindle. For our vacuum, all I needed was a 20 dollar replacement battery and the will unscrew 3 mini screws.
I haven't developed on the Kindle ecosystem, but with old Nook devices I am able to set a screensaver, alarm, and put the device into deep sleep between refreshes. This changed my battery life from ~48 hours into 30+ days of battery life even with some old devices.
The "electric sign" app does this, which is where I referenced the code.
With trmnl, the image only refreshes every 10 mins so the device will set a ~9 minute alarm to wake the device right before it needs to load the next update.
The refresh period is also configurable so a slower refresh interval (e.g. every hour for less time-sensitive screens) yields larger battery savings
For the less reverse-engineering prone among us, there are also similarly sized e-ink displays that plug into Raspberry Pi DSI ports for maybe $5 more on Aliexpress. They might actually be salvaged kindle screens.
One thing that's disappointed me is that despite all the excitement over better and cheaper battery technology, you can't buy a cheapish drop in replacement battery for e.g. an old kindle that has more storage capacity than the OEM version.
I understand there's like all sorts of complexities in standards, form factors, voltage, wattage, etc, but I really wish I could upgrade my old devices like that.
I removed the battery on mine, kept the battery chip and fed 5V into the battery terminals, from Kindle's USB connector, through a diode (so 4.4V-ish). Without a battery it needs something that can deliver at least 1.5A, for short bursts. An older powered usb hub seems to work fine, hub is connected to my raspberry pi, and I use ssh through usb networking, no wifi, no battery, worked fine for months now.
I removed the battery but kept the I2C chip/pcb, and fed 5V from USB port via a diode, on the PCB battery connections, seems to work fine. I actually installed a single wire from USB VCC to diode then + battery terminal. But you need to power the Kindle from something that can deliver at least 1.5A for startup peaks. A USB hub does the job fine in my case, and also connects it to a raspberry pi for ssh through USB networking, so no wifi either. Use a good USB cable for power.
A pretty dumb eInk display that could do one thing, that is, receive and blit a bitmap at a given location, would suffice for great many uses. It only needs a way to connect to wifi or zigbee securely, e.g. using TLS.
There is also the Xteink4[0] that can be purchased on Aliexpress. It's just an ESP32 with an e-ink screen.
It costs more and is smaller but when you are done playing around with it you can flash it with Crosspoint[1], carry it in your pocket and read books on an e-ink display wherever you are.
Hah I love the random Pokemon + remaining time for Laundry + Dishwasher! I'm not usually a big fan of smart appliances but boy oh boy would it be cool to display remaining time left for laundry on a dashboard...
Seems like it should work. Another commenter said that for their dash, they had a site that they kept open in the Kindle browser.
Although I did notice some weirdness with using the browser. I have an HTML endpoint up at https://kindle.mariannefeng.com/, and for some reason whenever I tried to go to that page using the Kindle browser, it returned a message about not being able to load the page. And I don't even think my page has javascript.
I never connect my RM2 to wifi and it's crazy, I don't charge it for months. Granted I use it maybe under 30 time a month too. I guess WiFi isn't necessarily disabled but yeah.
Haven't modded my paper white kindle, I'm thinking at the very least I'm going to get rid of those forced ads you read when you wake it up.
Project demonstrates participation in scientific and technical culture; author openly shares creative technical work and builds upon open-source community knowledge. Project represents cultural and scientific contribution to maker/hacker community.
FW Ratio: 57%
Observable Facts
Project is published as open-source code on GitHub (referenced in content).
Author explicitly acknowledges standing on shoulders of community by linking guides and resources.
Project demonstrates novel technical implementation (rotating HTML for vertical display) contributing original insight.
Content invites others to build similar projects and improve upon the work.
Inferences
Open-source publication demonstrates commitment to sharing fruits of creative labor with community.
Attribution of prior work shows respect for scientific/technical culture and its contributors.
Invitation to reuse and improve code reflects belief in collective progress and shared knowledge.
Content demonstrates open information sharing about technical project; detailed walkthrough of jailbreaking, modding, and server setup openly published. Educational approach supports free expression and information dissemination.
FW Ratio: 57%
Observable Facts
Page contains full technical documentation of project with step-by-step instructions.
Links to external resources (Kindle hacking wiki, GitHub repo) are provided openly.
Code snippets, configuration examples, and detailed commands are published in full.
No paywall, membership requirement, or access restrictions observable on the page.
Inferences
Open publication of technical knowledge demonstrates commitment to free information sharing.
Providing full source code and detailed instructions enables others to exercise their own technical creativity.
Accessibility of content without barriers supports Article 19's principle of disseminating information.
Content implicitly supports education by documenting and sharing technical knowledge. Provides detailed educational walkthrough enabling others to learn modding, server configuration, and hardware customization.
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
Page contains structured educational content with numbered steps and explanations.
External learning resources (Kindle modding wiki, helpful blog posts) are cited and linked.
Code examples and technical explanations are provided in accessible language with commentary.
Inferences
Detailed documentation reflects intention to educate and enable others to learn and build.
Removal of barriers to access supports educational participation across different skill levels.
Code and documentation made publicly available; GitHub repository enables collaborative scientific/technical work. Project builds on and contributes to collective technical knowledge.
Content freely accessible without paywall; no subscription or authentication barrier. GitHub repository referenced enables others to access and fork code.
build 1ad9551+j7zs · deployed 2026-03-02 09:09 UTC · evaluated 2026-03-02 13:57:54 UTC
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