from Hacker News

It's School time: Adventures in hacking an old Kindle

by FlyingSnake on 4/28/25, 3:02 PM with 49 comments

• by bigiain on 4/29/25, 11:24 PM

  In case the author ever sees this...

  If you have that battery level available off the Kindle, you can use it to turn a wifi "smart plug" on and off, to automatically top the charge up only when required.

  (Or, more old-school, use a powerpoint timer set to only power up for a short time each day. I did this way back, when the place I worked decided they needed iPads stuck next to meeting room doors to stop arguments about who had it booked, but when they first installed them they left them plugged into the charger 24x7, and the batteries in them would puff up in 8-12 months and kill the iPads. Putting the charger in a timer so they only charged hour a day saved them about $6,000 a year in puffed up iPads.)

• by mtlynch on 4/29/25, 10:39 PM

  >I designed a backend API that collected the data in real-time data and exported it as a PNG image.

  Does anyone know why in these Kindle modding dashboards, they always generate the dashbard image on an external server? Why isn't it possible to build all that functionality into an executable on the Kindle itself? You've got a Linux environment, so why can't you run all the logic locally?

• by shlip on 4/30/25, 1:05 PM

  A bit tengential to the subject here, but maybe someone can tell which kindle is the easiest to jailbreak without it having to be registered ? I see that Windbreak needs device registration and that's a bit of a show stopper for me...

• by dmitrygr on 4/29/25, 8:04 PM

  4 significant figures on weather temperature is kind of funny to look at. Must be some very accurate forecasts

• by marcod on 4/30/25, 6:18 AM

  I just realized I had a few Kindle Fires lying around in a box.

  I wanted to give one to a friend who didn't have a good phone so she could listen to audio books. Turns out those old Fires are no longer updated and Android is so old I can't even install anything current on it.

  I hope to change that with https://kindlemodding.org/ which was mentioned, so appreciate the writeup :)

• by megous on 4/30/25, 2:08 AM

  Hacking here seems to have been done by others.

  Anyway, speaking of hacking... check out what pocketbook creators themselves did with some of the older pocketbook models. They managed to drive eInk display panel from a normal RGB LCD interface, because they used a SoC (A13) without eInk interface. One of the weirder things I saw during my reverse-engineering adventures. :D

• by ishanmahapatra on 4/30/25, 10:00 AM

  Unfortunately, Winterbreak doesn’t work on Kindles with the latest firmware (5.18.1 or 2). And there’s no way to downgrade the firmware to an earlier one without having previously jailbroken your device.

  So now it’s a waiting game to see when the new method for the latest firmware will be ready for the public.

• by larodi on 4/30/25, 6:36 AM

  Old kindles should be donated to engineering schools and academia to break it into pieces and do new hacks with them. Amazon produced so many of them there’s always one 7” lying around at a friend’s desk.

• by stavros on 4/30/25, 12:29 AM

  Is there anything like this that can wake the Kindle up, get an image, and then sleep it again? I have an old Kindle that I want to show stuff on, but I don't want to keep it plugged in all the time.

• by mahi_novice on 4/29/25, 8:27 PM

  Love this! Always fun to do stuff like this.

• by butz on 4/30/25, 2:46 PM

  It might be faster, and cheaper, to build SVG file and render it on server directly to correct format.

• by gitroom on 4/29/25, 9:27 PM

  lol i get weirdly obsessed with decimal places on stuff like this too - makes me laugh every time.

• by badmonster on 4/30/25, 2:47 AM

  highlights for me:cf-wasm for image transformation and the graceful handling of real-world issues like BVG strikes.

• by goodboyjojo on 4/30/25, 11:25 AM

  cool read. its always good to breath life into an old device with hacking and modding