Hacking an old Kindle to display bus arrival times

As someone who worked on kindle power consumption many years ago: One of the (by far) biggest consumers of power is the WiFi connection. It has to wake up and respond to the AP in order to not get disconnected every x seconds.

Off the top of my head, I think 'on' average power consumption was ~700uA without wifi, and about 1.5mA+/- with Wifi. This is from over a decade ago, so my memory is fuzzy though...

Obviously, page changes used relatively large amounts of power. I don't recall the exact amounts, but it was 100s of mA for seconds.

There is also an "every x pages, do a full screen refresh (black to white)" to fix up the ghosting issue that the article writer saw.

Kindles are fun devices to hack and play with. I can grab an old kindle for €15-20 on eBay.

I did the same last year and had lots of fun in the process.

https://samkhawase.com/blog/hacking-kindle/

I made something like this! Except I have it plugged into an outlet in the kitchen, so no battery to deal with. It's a little hacky but it works for me.

https://github.com/jonmon6691/arduino_busstop

I love using Kindle's as single purpose tablet/interfaces/displays. I'm the weirdo who actually prefers the LCD displays vs eInk and it's incredibly easy to set Kindle Fire's into dev mode which lets you display a webpage, never turn off while connected to power and never show ads.

You can regularly find the Kindle Fire HD10s for ~$40

I was glad to see the note about battery life down at the bottom. My biggest challenge with the old Kindles I have laying around is that most of them won't hold a charge!

For some reason, this project reminds me of this one:

https://engineersneedart.com/systemsix/systemsix.html

Why Jailbreak the Kindle when you can just open its browser and visit a website that shows the arrival times?

The Kindle browser is surprisingly decent, I made Claude Code generate an RSS feed reader compatible with the Kindle browser, with the ability to read full articles (for those feeds that require you to visit the website), and download articles. It also supports Reddit and Google News RSS feed. This is my new favorite way of browsing the internet.

https://github.com/adhamsalama/simple-rss-reader

A little bit of a hijack, but it's hard to find a more relevant time to post this.

For a defunct startup, I built this exact thing as a product for coffee shops:

cafetren.com.ar

https://cafetren-com-ar.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_... (translated from spanish):

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