*an eink development platform c:

The kindle system is a joy to dig around in. The UI‘s based on X, awesome WM, GTK and a bunch of mostly unobfuscated shell scripts and JS.

One thing I‘d love would to find a way to make it wake up every once in a while to turn it into an auto-refreshing display. I haven’t found a way to do so without external hardware (which could save a lot of power by not having to wake the whole system, but I think the wakeup can’t be triggered via the serial port and other contacts aren’t as easily accessible).

(2021) At the time (373 points, 95 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26073463

In 2022 (159 points, 24 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32293238

While cool, ultimately not usable due to the very limited hardware.

I've tried these in the past but always found the software/firmware side of it too fiddly for the reward (against the grain for a lot of people, I know), which is a pity as the hardware side is really rewarding (for me).

Recently, doing it with Claude Code was a breeze. If you are more interested in the outcome than the process, then I'd say it's a great time to buy a few old Kindles and see what you can create with them.

Serial might have been a bit unnecesary here, since there are USB hacks you can exploit to achieve the same over at mobileread.

You also might want to turn off some background scripts in /etc/init.rc/ such as the screensaver, unload the audio/mic, stop the window manager if you're not using it, and stop the webreader.

https://github.com/pascalw/kindle-dash/blob/main/src/dash.sh