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Show HN: Low-power Kindle-based dashboard

by PascalW on 1/28/21, 7:04 AM with 71 comments

  • by htk on 1/28/21, 10:05 AM

    This code does not render the dashboard itself. It's expected that what to display on the screen is rendered elsewhere and can be fetchd via HTTP(s). This is both more power efficient and allows you to use any tool you like to produce the dashboard image.

    I love these “under engineered” solutions. I’d be tempted to do everything in the Kindle itself, but he achieved what he needed with much less effort and higher flexibility.

  • by dalbasal on 1/28/21, 1:23 PM

    It's a pity there isn't more action in the e ink application/device world. Seems like there's so much potential. I'd love a kindle-like laptop for writing.

    I guess it's just extremely hard to compete for a beachhead against an incumbent (mobile touch displays) that's more general and mass produced.

  • by bergie on 1/28/21, 8:53 AM

    If you don't have a spare Kindle lying around, smallish e-paper modules are nowadays quite cheap, and can be driven easily from a Raspberry Pi (Zero W upwards).

    That's what we did on our boat:

    https://github.com/meri-imperiumi/dashboard

  • by sradman on 1/28/21, 11:55 AM

    Since updating an eInk screen is relatively expensive, I suspect this system could be made more efficient by issuing conditional HTTP requests (last-modified or eTag) and only refreshing the screen when the dashboard image changes. This assumes both the ht client and dashboard server support conditional requests.

    The system consists of a set of shell scripts that run on a jailbroken Kindle. It includes ht, an HTTPie clone written in Rust that makes requests to a dashboard server using software like Dashbling.

  • by firasd on 1/28/21, 9:21 AM

    Very cool! I've been thinking about this.. let me just paste my tweets thread from a few weeks ago:

    --

    An issue with mobile UX is that it's tricky to maintain 'ambient awareness'. How do you 'keep an eye' on Slack? You have to foreground it & disable screen locking, or get push notifications.

    On desktop you can just alt+tab to it every so often, plus the taskbar icon lights up.

    I sometimes use Chrome on desktop to address a similar requirement (they have a feature to 'pin' a tab, so you can have GMail plus stuff like WhatsApp pinned.)

    Would be cool if there was a cheap always-on tablet that could display arbitrary web widgets like a calendar, slack etc

    Just thinking about this ambient computing thing reminds me of the ‘Chumby’, a cute smart alarm clock from the early 2000s.

    Apparently the Amazon Echo Show is a bit of a successor. And I came across a wall-mounted calendar display called ‘Dakboard’ (it’s like $400 though.)

    I have a use case that sounds ridiculously lazy, but I guess has been a problem for me for most of this decade: I need to know the time in various cities without doing any work besides a glance

    ---

    Addendum: over the last couple days I've been looking into stuff like Arduino, Raspberry Pi etc but re-using a Kindle is cool if you don't want to do a whole electronics project

  • by keyle on 1/28/21, 8:27 AM

    I tried to jail break my kindle a while back. But Amazon auto pushed a new firmware and prevented it minutes before I could reboot with the crack. So now my device is up to date and catching dust again. Thanks Amazon.

  • by makepanic on 1/28/21, 8:57 AM

    That's cool.

    I've build a similar thing for my kindle.

    https://github.com/makepanic/eink-weather

    It is a simple website, which a headless chrome screenshots to use with the online screensaver app.

    A browser might be overkill but I wanted to avoid manual layouting.

  • by spuz on 1/28/21, 9:16 AM

    I love this idea - roughly how long do you think the battery would last if you had a dashboard that updated every hour?

  • by ingend88 on 1/28/21, 1:52 PM

    Nice project!!! I love these e-ink based projects that enable you to provide data without looking it up.

    Is there a way to enable real-time messaging on to an e-ink device ? For e.g. I would love to keep a kindle running that can show a message when I am on the road.

  • by Hopka on 1/28/21, 8:33 PM

    In addition to the power efficiency, one advantage of an e-ink screen is that it does not illuminate a room at night. And interestingly, a Kindle or similar device still seems to be the cheapest way to get a touch-enabled e-ink display of a reasonable size.

    FWIW the Kindle Paperwhite also has an Experimental "Beta Browser" that can display websites and execute some JavaScript - I am using that for a similar project, a basic dashboard / light switch web application hosted on a Raspberry Pi.

    https://github.com/janhapke/screendle

  • by jrockway on 1/28/21, 6:21 PM

    I made an eink clock / status display a while back. The thing ran on a tiny lithium-ion battery for weeks, which was nifty. But the flash when the screen refreshes every minute is super distracting if it's anywhere in your field of view. That to me was a dealbreaker. (If it helps, the datasheet says that it damages the display to refresh it every minute, and it did indeed die mysteriously after a year or so!)

    I think I like normal LCDs for status displays. It is possible to redraw the screen without inverting it and drawing a lot of attention, so it is more "ambient".

  • by borzunov on 1/28/21, 9:57 PM

    Reminded me of the tool turning Pocketbook E-Ink readers into computer monitors, which I made several years ago:

    https://github.com/borzunov/remoteink

    This could also be used for the dashboards if connected to a remote server or a Raspberry Pi (no screen updates happen if the content doesn't change).

    Besides that, it allows to zoom in/out, switch between the opened windows, and move around the screen with keyboard shortcuts. No jailbreak is needed for the reader.

  • by figbert on 1/28/21, 8:33 AM

    I just jailbroke my Kindle the other day – PaperWhite 4. Loving KOReader, and looking for more things to run. Awesome to see that there are still modders out there.

  • by CGamesPlay on 1/28/21, 8:54 AM

    I'd love to use this on my working Kindle. Is that possible? Basically, replace the "screensaver" program with this dashboard?

  • by codesternews on 1/28/21, 8:49 AM

    How you learned the jail breaking and figure out all this? How much time it took to create? Can you please tell me i am interested. Thanks

  • by tluyben2 on 1/28/21, 11:54 AM

    This type of idea would work nice with Boox; easy to program (android) and so far the battery life has been stellar.

  • by clash on 1/28/21, 2:36 PM

    Very cool. If someone is looking for a device with even better battery life: I created something similar -- albeit with a different approach to its visual appearance.

    See: https://framelabs.eu/en/

  • by cmiller1 on 1/28/21, 3:23 PM

    Made a pull request to fix a small typo in the readme of this, noticed after the fact I had a typo in my commit description. Muphry's Law in action! Oh well, I'm leaving it and blaming it on this macbook pro keyboard.

  • by heroHACK17 on 1/28/21, 2:53 PM

    Nice! I have always wanted to build one of these for my car. Can you report on the latency of your dashboard?

  • by girishso on 1/28/21, 8:24 AM

    Nice. How hard it will be install this on a Kindle Paperwhite with completely broken touch sensor?

  • by rijoja on 1/28/21, 5:02 PM

    Which models of the Kindle can be jailbroken?

  • by dh-g on 1/28/21, 2:05 PM

    Nice job and thanks for the mention.

  • by KaiserPro on 1/28/21, 8:26 AM

    This is excellent work, well done!