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Turning an old Amazon Kindle into a eInk development platform
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agoif anyone can sell these as "refurbished" boards, i would like to buy a few like that recent guy who bought like 200 Rpis and fixed them and sold them for charity. it would be a good thing to bring these old devices out of the trashcan
- nickt 6y agoe-radionica on Crowdsupply are recycling old Kindle screens for their Inkplate 6 and 10 displays. https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica https://www.crowdsupply.com/e-radionica
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agothis is nice. i will certainly look this up
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago...at $99 and $129 each (!)
- eloeffler 6y agoMight be relevant for you: There also appears to be a way of reusing broken e-ink displays as DIY segment displays. Summary on Hackaday: https://hackaday.com/2017/04/12/can-you-build-an-e-ink-display-from-scratch/ https://hackaday.com/2017/04/12/can-you-build-an-e-ink-displ... and the russian-language article it refers to: http://we.easyelectronics.ru/HomeTech/izgotovlenie-segmentnogo-indikatora-na-elektronnyh-chernilah-v-kartinkah.html http://we.easyelectronics.ru/HomeTech/izgotovlenie-segmentno...
- thomasswift 6y agoThis is great! I've Got a few of these - going to try this out
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agoplease do that and it would be nice if something productive can be done with a setup like this, maybe output some grafana charts or use as controller for home automation or other stuff...
- unityByFreedom 6y agoWish I could buy this out of the box. I want my code on e-Ink and the render on my monitor.
- miles 6y agoDASUNG makes far and away the best E Ink monitor at present: https://dasung-tech.myshopify.com/ https://dasung-tech.myshopify.com/
- unityByFreedom 6y agoDo you know if that company licenses the E-Ink patents? Or is it a copy? I generally don't trust the Chinese companies b/c IME they don't have any sort of return policy or useable warranty.
- AlanYx 6y agoThey source their panels directly from the E-Ink Company, like everyone else. Dasung also has two granted (and one pending) Chinese patents for their e-ink driver board tech, which actually works pretty amazingly well.
- akavel 6y agoAccording to some YouTube videos, they plan to release a 23.5" monitor "soon".
- jimmies 6y agoHere you go! https://www.banggood.com/M5Stack-p-1779386.html https://www.banggood.com/M5Stack-p-1779386.html
- abdullahkhalids 6y agoWaveshare sells these overpriced e-ink monitors that connect via HDMI https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/eink-disp-103.htm https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/eink-disp...
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- qwertay 6y agoI tried to get UART access in to my kobo ereader. I was starting to get some boot text coming over and then somehow I managed to kill it. Thing was complaining about some file being missing while booting. Wouldn't turn on with my USB uart thing removed as well. Kinda sucks but oh well.
- sireat 6y agoI reflashed a demo Kindle DXG to factory using pretty much the same technique some 7 years ago. Hardest step was soldering connectors for UART to USB bridge. Luckily had a friend handy with a soldering iron. After that I used a terminal program to get to uboot screen and simply upload new factory image (I think zmodem was supported). I also got SHH access to the device. I vaguely remember some sort of weird process for obtaining password. It seemed Kindle apps at the time were just a bunch of jars Most of the information came from a collection of posts on mobileread forums. At the time Kindle DX was selling for $200+ on eBay while demo(locked) versions were selling under $50 in quantities of 100. The demo Kindles were used as display models in some brick and mortar store(Best Buy?). I briefly considered starting a small venture reflashing those Kindles but then decided against it. Sony DPT-S1 came out and was so much nicer to use than Kindle.
- donw 6y agoI love these sorts of projects. I love the creativity, and better still, from an ecological perspective, it is nominally far better to reuse components or repurpose entire products, than it is to throw them away and buy something new.
- sieste 6y agoThe tragedy is that this project counts as "repurposing", and required days of a domain expert hacking on it. Imagine the resources we could save if displaying things on a display were easy.
- organizescrape 6y agoThis project could definitely be considered repurposing - there's pretty much nothing happening in this article that hasn't already been covered in much greater detail on the Kindle Developers Corner over at MobileRead: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=150 https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=150.
- krzyk 6y agoWell, actually it is. I haven't found a way to setup wifi using command line on that forums. And also installing just ssh.
- simias 6y agoIt's a very cool hack but I don't really understand the final purpose. What's an "eInk development platform"? I thought they would use the Kindle as a monitor and code on it, but instead they're left with an outdated, unsupported and under powered ARM SoC shell? The "Future" section mentions replacing the display driver but even if that works out I'm still unclear what's the final purpose.
- PurpleFoxy 6y agoThey mean a platform for developing for eink, not a development platform using eink. Lots of people want to make projects with epaper displays but it’s not particularly easy or cheap to source the panels and hook them up to a Linux system. Reusing these ereaders makes it cheap and easy.
- organizescrape 6y agoThe main issue with this is that a Kindle is not a typical Linux environment; they use heavily patched kernels that range from old to hideously old depending on the age of the device, have a severely stripped down userspace similar to most other embedded devices and it's a pain to set up the development tools needed to compile software against the various libc/kernel versions used across the Kindle family.
- regularfry 6y agoThat's fine if you're using the built-in kernel as a souped-up display driver. All you need is a way to make pixels happen, the rest can happen off-device.
- krzyk 6y agoExactly I'm in a process of turning one Kindle into a openhab panel. I failed a bit during the soldering part (the pads got unglued, so now I need to push hard a conductive cable, until I get wifi and ssh up and working). This post will greatly help me because I mostly need that: wifi and ssh working (and then make the pixels happen :), but I saw a solution for that on mobileread forums).
- pencillr 6y agoGreat! I alctually always wanted to hack one to turn it into a home weather/calendar screen. It would be great for the purpose as it's battery efficient.
- josteink 6y agoI have that exact model, collecting dust, and now I'm really tempted to go modding it. Maybe I could create a useful and subtle e-ink "dashboard" somewhere around the house? I mean, this looks totally doable.
- PascalW 6y agoIf your Kindle 4 NT is not broken it's actually pretty easy to root it and use as a dashboard. Shameless plug: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25939042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25939042
- qwerty456127 6y agoI'm eager to see 100% (not dual-screen like Lenovo) eInk laptops and eInk-optimized GUIs to come. I'm thrilled to imagine how much neural energy (sounds stupid, I know, but I hope many understand what I mean) could it save me if I my working display (where I mostly work with eMail, text documents and some code, never really needed anything colorful or dynamic at work) was an eInk and I was only presented the very information I need (rather than tons of bullshit visual effects modern GUIs consist of). There seem to be an emerging trend to "digital minimalism", perhaps it could drive the sales.
- eeZah7Ux 6y agoUnfortunately that would require tons of work on the UI and a big rethinking of the dumpster fire known as web.
- sildur 6y agoI suggest gopher.
- qwerty456127 6y agoYeah. Gopher, Gemini or something slightly more sophisticated. In fact HTTP/HTML/CSS are OK if you use them the right way.
- qwerty456127 6y agoGood! These already beg for the rethinking.
- eeZah7Ux 6y agoReally? More silent downvotes? Did I touch a sore spot?
- simias 6y agoI'm also looking forward to using an eInk display for work, but I'm not quite as optimistic as you are for minimalism. As the technology improves we're going to see higher and higher framerates, and eventually color eInk will be affordable. IMO it's much more likely that we'll end up with the same visually overloaded GUIs, just running on a color, 60fps eInk display than having the whole industry return to static black and white.
- jerome-jh 6y agoMighty device! Once rooted, a very capable ebook reader. Great for reading out of copyright epubs or scans from archive.org. The latter are best read in landscape orientation though. Absolutely not missing the touchscreen.
- fullstop 6y agoUsing Calibre to convert the books to azw3 or mobi and side-loading them over USB seems like less of a battle than rooting.. and you keep the touch screen.
- ByThyGrace 6y agoThe blog post is greatly interesting, yet this bit melted my heart: > In case that site dies here’s the key snippet of Javascript: By taking the initiative and archiving this bit of crucial information and not simply trusting that the link will remain there permanently, they go beyond thoughtfulness.
- adreamingsoul 6y agoAgreed! I too appreciated that.
- Tepix 6y agoThe original script is still alive at https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1873256 https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1873256 but it requires running python. A web browser is less of a hassle for many.
- aembleton 6y agoIt looks simple enough to install md5sum and copy the parts of the hash that you need.
- sudeepdino008 6y agoI wish there were courses on hardware hacking. It's more of a niche art today. Such valuable information deserves to be taught rather than the nth java tutorial.
- initramfs 6y agoHacking is more a way of thinking than a skill to be learned. For example, When I look at e-ink displays, I think of its potential as a general purpose monitor, even though 99% of eink screens are not general purpose monitors with HDMI/VGA-out. So hacking is the process of determining how this custom built display only works with Acme (any) Corporation, and how it could be reverse- engineered to be used for other purposes. I recommend this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture I agree with most of it except this: "Hacking is not using process of elimination to find a solution; it's the process of finding a clever solution to a problem." Hacking IMO is finding a solution to extend or enhance a feature by ANY legal means, but also ethical and moral ways, whether it is a tediously deductive approach or an innovative approach. Process of elimination, and logical thinking when used for hacking, is still hacking, even though it may be a technique used by more scientific or professional fields. "Using things in a unique way outside their intended purpose is often perceived as having hack value." This really is up to the user-If something serves a purpose even for one person, it still has value- it doesn't mean others need to like it.
- bloopernova 6y agoI wonder what it would be like to develop on an e-ink screen? It would have to update at least 15 frames per second or typing would feel too laggy. I'd like to see a 600dpi 256-colour screen.
- ssebastianj 6y agoYou could also show Python docs on a Kindle using its experimental browser: 1. On the development machine: $ python3 -m pydoc -n 0.0.0.0 -p 8888 2. On the Kindle web browser: http://DOCS_MACHINE_IP:8888 http://DOCS_MACHINE_IP:8888 It's slow, sometimes times renders with ghosting, ant-sized fonts, but hey, the docs' search works. I rarely (almost never) use this setup but is nice to use the Kindle for other uses apart from books
- dominotw 6y agoI recently bought boox air, a 10.3 inch eink android tablet. I read much more now that i ever used to, i had completely given up doing any kind of even moderate reading. My eyes have hard time adjusting to reading on a screen but do amazingly well on an eink device. I use google play books to read and reference books and it works amazingly well on boox air.
- TheMagicHorsey 6y agoIs it possible to read Kindle books on that reader? I unfortunately have invested a lot of money building up my Kindle library, and I now feel trapped on Amazon's small screen e-readers. I've been waiting for a large screen Kindle for some time.
- dominotw 6y agoYes. Its a full fledged android device with play store. I use kindle android app on it to read kindle books.
- newhouseb 6y agoA cool thing to note is that you can't read Kindle "Textbooks" on any first-party Amazon e-ink device but you _can_ read them on a Boox e-ink device precisely because it runs Android (read: eTextbooks are supported in the Kindle Android App but not native Kindle devices). Not to mention you can read other textbook-like sources on e-ink like O'Reilly Books and Scribd as well through their Android apps. Source: Bought a Boox Max Lumi and it's been the best device I've purchased in years.
- dominotw 6y agoI was trying to use orielly app but it doesn't seem very good on eink. Has crazy amount of ghosting. > Bought a Boox Max Lumi I was going back and forth between lumi and air. Are you finding bigger screen more useful for reading tech books?
- klmadfejno 6y agoI wish someone would just go make an eink boardgame company.
- CameronNemo 6y agoSee also: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Kobo_Clara_HD_(kobo-clara) https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Kobo_Clara_HD_(kobo-clara...
- tyler109 6y agoFeatured in /r/eink https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/lh14ug/turning_an_old_amazon_kindle_into_a_eink/ https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/lh14ug/turning_an_old...