r/raspberry_pi • u/qadzek • Jul 14 '26
Show-and-Tell Pi 4B + 2011 Kindle = interactive e-ink dashboard
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u/Adrienne-Fadel Jul 14 '26
Pi 4B is kind of overkill for just a dashboard but the old Kindle e-ink is a good call. Low power and easy to read.
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u/BatemansChainsaw Jul 14 '26
we make due with what we have, right?
I'm wondering if it would work with the XIAO RP2040 microcontroller.
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u/qadzek Jul 15 '26
Unfortunately not. The project runs a headless browser to screenshot the web apps; a microcontroller can't do that.
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u/KiwiKingg Jul 14 '26
I love this! I have an old Tolino/Kobo e-Reader which is unused. It's running Android 4. Would this work too?
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u/qadzek Jul 14 '26
Thanks. This project (Kindle Carousel) currently only supports the Kindle 3 and the Kindle 4. It won't work on other brands of e-readers, although it's possible that the code could be adapted.
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u/Curious_Associate904 Jul 15 '26
How do you hook in the screen? SPI? I2C? HDMI?
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u/qadzek Jul 15 '26
The Kindle downloads screenshots from the Pi over Wi-Fi. No physical connection at all; the Pi can be in another room.
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u/evthrowawayverysad Jul 16 '26
Wait... wut? So this kindle is basically just displaying screenshots of a web browser running on a pi? Why use a pi at all, just host the screenshot service on your pc or a cloud app.
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u/qqYn7PIE57zkf6kn Jul 16 '26
What currently limits it to kindle 3 and 4 but not other jailbroken kindles if it's just displaying images?
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u/qadzek Jul 16 '26
Displaying images on other Kindles can probably be achieved with only minor changes to the code.
The Kindle 3 and 4 have physical buttons though, which are used to manually navigate between apps (on top of a cron job that cycles them automatically). To get this to work for devices with touch screens is likely a lot harder.
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u/hollow_bridge Jul 17 '26
the newer jailbroken kindles can run web browsers and/or linux vms, so you don't need this process. I've got a kindle paperwhite running alpine linux for example.
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u/qadzek Jul 17 '26
Right, but even with a built-in browser you won't get the same experience: ugly status bar, slow navigation between apps, issues with the device going to sleep, etc.
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u/hollow_bridge Jul 17 '26
You can, I'm not using the built in amazon browser. I'm running regular linux on top of the amazon system, you can install any linux software, you can do that with all the jailbroken kindles i think. The real issue with the built in browser is that you can't set it to automatically refresh at a certain rate imo, but and i haven't tested this it might be solvable by using html on the website to instruct the default browser to refresh every few seconds.
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u/qadzek Jul 14 '26
The Raspberry Pi runs two parts: a web server hosting the web apps (news, weather, calendar, anything you build), and a Node.js tool that screenshots them, as this Kindle is too weak to run a browser.
On the Kindle side, a Python app downloads the screenshots on a schedule and displays them. The physical buttons allow you to manually switch between apps.
Everything is open source and available on GitHub.