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What just happened? A developer has managed to transform an Amazon Kindle e-reader into a portable E Ink monitor. Adhityaa showcased the clever workaround on X after experiencing a laptop screen disaster over the weekend. Rather than discarding the damaged laptop, he decided to repurpose the Kindle as an auxiliary display, giving it new life.
The process, as detailed on GitHub, begins by jailbreaking the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite 3, which grants low-level access to the device's internals. The developer suggests consulting a thread on the MobileRead forums for instructions, though any method is acceptable as long as it provides access to the root shell.
Once the Kindle is jailbroken, a simple Go program is run on the device to receive incoming image files. These image files are captured on the Mac in PNG format. The script then uses the built-in 'eips' command utility to render the images on the E Ink display. The entire program comprised "about 30 lines of code," although the developer mentions that he lost the source code.
destroyed my laptop screen yesterday, so I did the obvious thing and jailbroke my Kindle to use it as a monitor pic.twitter.com/W8ZEK8t4OL
– Adhityaa (@adtac_) August 4, 2024
On the computer side, the developer wrote another script to repeatedly capture the screen, convert it into a format the Kindle can render, and transfer it over USB to the listening server on the Kindle's IP address.
To summarize, the screen is captured as a PNG file, compressed into a grayscale JPEG suitable for the Kindle, and transferred over a USB network connection to the device, where it is then redrawn on the display.
Adhityaa thought the best way to demonstrate his work was by Rickrolling his audience, and we can't blame him. When was the last time you got Rickrolled by an E Ink panel?
Of course, this is just a proof-of-concept that isn't optimized for performance at the moment. The current implementation can only manage a slideshow of 3-4 frames per second, with Rick Astley turning into a white, garbled mess between frames.
However, he believes that with some optimization, it could easily reach a smooth 10 FPS. The actual maximum frame rate of this Paperwhite model is unclear, but it's unlikely to be much higher than that.
"Without reinventing codecs like H.264 and protocols like VNC, it should be possible to quickly improve this with just the tools we already have," he notes.