7 ms·

Show HN: Low-power Kindle-based dashboard

284 points by PascalW 6y ago

girishso 6y ago
Nice. How hard it will be install this on a Kindle Paperwhite with completely broken touch sensor?
- PascalW 6y ago
  You do need the screen to kick off the jailbreak process I'm afraid.
KaiserPro 6y ago
This is excellent work, well done!
keyle 6y ago
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.
- PascalW 6y ago
  Yeah they seem to actively prevent jailbreaking on more recent devices. I specifically picked up a used Kindle 4 NT for this project, because it's so easy to jailbreak.
- drran 6y ago
  Try Onix Boox. They have stock Android. Some of them have internal SD card, which is easy to replace with your own.
figbert 6y ago
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.
codesternews 6y ago
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
- PascalW 6y ago
  https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle4NTHacking https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle4NTHacking and the mobileread forums have a wealth of information on this topic!
bergie 6y ago
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 https://github.com/meri-imperiumi/dashboard
- jcun4128 6y ago
  I am thinking about this (e-paper) but drive it from an ESP (preferably 01) and connect it to a battery where it could last say months/years that would be nice. I was able to do a hardware mod someone posted where you can put it into a self-wake deep sleep if that makes sense for power saving. Otherwise I currently do desktop notifications/speech text. I have a basic Kindle too (paper?) And it's amazing the battery life.
  - PascalW 6y ago
    I considered this as well but didn't really want to mess with the hardware. But if you're up for that you can buy the components yourself, or go for something like inkplate [1] which is an E-paper display + ESP microcontroller and battery in one package. [1] https://inkplate.io/ https://inkplate.io/
    - jcun4128 6y ago
      $100? hmm this price may not be that bad though, considering the display seems to be the most expensive aspect and I'm not finding a similar price/size on Amazon. One thing I want to learn/address personally is a charging circuit so I'd rather build it myself. Still it is nice to know this is out there ready to go. Also I have to use these ESP01's I bought haha. The code itself I imagine wouldn't be difficult eg. an http get request firing at whatever interval to your own local/remote endpoint. Would have to see about the ESP driver part to display to eInk.
      - jpgleeson 6y ago
        The price definitely seems great for the size of the display, but it might be worth looking at the Waveshare e-paper displays if you want to do something a bit more DIY.
CGamesPlay 6y ago
I'd love to use this on my working Kindle. Is that possible? Basically, replace the "screensaver" program with this dashboard?
- PascalW 6y ago
  Yes that should be possible. You could use this as a starting point: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3812831&postcount=2 https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3812831&pos.... With that you can wait for the 'goingToScreenSaver' event and then write your dashboard to the screen. There are some minor downsides though. If you keep the built-in Kindle UI running it will draw a menubar on the screen when the Wi-Fi connection status changes and power consumption will be a bit higher with this setup. All in all still a good tradeoff if you want to keep using the Kindle for it's original purpose too. Edit: someone else posted a link to this tool which does exactly this: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=236104 https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=236104
makepanic 6y ago
That's cool. I've build a similar thing for my kindle. https://github.com/makepanic/eink-weather 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.
spuz 6y ago
I love this idea - roughly how long do you think the battery would last if you had a dashboard that updated every hour?
- PascalW 6y ago
  I don't know exactly yet, but from what I'm now seeing it consumes 3-4% battery per day, with the dashboard updating every 30 minutes for 10 hours a day. I'm only letting it update during office hours, so I reckon I should get around a month of battery life with this usage.
  - spuz 6y ago
    That is great. A month of usage is what I would consider acceptable for this kind of product.
firasd 6y ago
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
- sinstein 6y ago
  Some time ago Das Keyboard launched a keyboard where each individual led could be configured to light up on the basis of some external input. https://www.daskeyboard.com/p/5q-cloud-connected-rgb-mechanical-keyboard/ https://www.daskeyboard.com/p/5q-cloud-connected-rgb-mechani... So you could theoretically bind Slack status to a key (say your F1) key and have it turn red when there was an unread message. I think that was/is a great solution to ambient awareness
- theshrike79 6y ago
  > Would be cool if there was a cheap always-on tablet that could display arbitrary web widgets like a calendar, slack etc You can do this with any $100 Android tablet or - to a lesser degree - a left-over iPad that's too old for anything relevant. Software-wise you have a bunch of options: Magic Mirror and Home Assistant are the most common ones. Dakboard works as a SaaS solution without their custom hardware, the free option is way too limited. HA is more for home automation though and Magic Mirror's actual purpose is to mount the display behind a two-way mirror (thus the "Magic" part) I've got a cheapo chinese dual boot Atom Windows/Android tablet mounted on my kitchen wall with an analog clock, our shared family calendar, Netatmo data (indoor+outdoor) and weather forecast. Works like a charm. If it wasn't so crappy I could use something like Kiosk Browser[1] to have it use the front-facing camera and only turn the display on when it detects motion. Now I just use Tasker to turn the display off at night and dim it during evenings. A bunch of people are just mounting old computer monitors on the wall and using a Rasperry Pi (Zero/2/3/4) as a kiosk-browser. The Wife Acceptance Factor is a bit lower on those though. Most likely you'd need to disassemble the display and add some fancy frames. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.ozerov.fully&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.ozerov.full...
htk 6y ago
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.
- bovermyer 6y ago
  Agreed. This is both clever and simple, a rare combo.
- safog 6y ago
  I think this has been the standard approach for all e-ink displays that have been floating around (both homemade and commercial). So, yeah, I appreciate it but it's not specifically innovative in this regard.
  - rakoo 6y ago
    Sometimes you need to tune down innovation and just finish your project
- kevincox 6y ago
  The only real downsize is that text rendering engines like to know the display pixel layout. However for the display on the kindle it probably isn't a major concern. On the other hand HTML is nice because you could use the same code on two differently sized devices (to an extent).
tluyben2 6y ago
This type of idea would work nice with Boox; easy to program (android) and so far the battery life has been stellar.
- PascalW 6y ago
  Might be a nice fit indeed. I considered doing this on my Remarkable 2, but it's a bit tricky to combine a dashboard with actually using the product as it's intended (for note-taking, in this case). The advantage of using a Kindle like this is that it's cheap enough that I don't have to use it for anything else. I bought the Kindle used for €25.
sradman 6y ago
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.
- PascalW 6y ago
  That's an interesting idea! It depends a bit on the data that is shown on the dashboard, but I guess in many cases the data is quite static. The data on my dashboard can change at any time in theory, but there are many times where the data remains the same for 2-3 hours.
- tyingq 6y ago
  The ht program doesn't appear to support conditional downloads. It also doesn't support a HEAD request, which is odd, as it supports GET, POST, PUT, PATH, DELETE. With a HEAD request, you could do the Etag or Last-Modified comparison yourself. I suppose you could just download the image and do a "diff -q" or compare an MD5 checksum, or even just file size. Or use a different tool maybe? I see that rural supports head requests. https://crates.io/crates/rural https://crates.io/crates/rural Edit: Appears that ht may be able to get response headers. It's sort of a documentation bug. It has a -p/--print option, but the README doesn't document what the arguments are. Found it.. "ht -p h https://google.com https://google.com" returns the headers, so you could extract the Etag or Last-Modified header.
  - sradman 6y ago
    HTTPie supports headers using header-name:value CLI parameters; I didn't check whether ht supports these. You would have to save the proper response header between requests. The question then turns to how the 304 Not Modified response is handled.
    - deleted 6y ago
dalbasal 6y ago
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.
- jbarrow 6y ago
  In terms of a Kindle-like laptop for writing, I’ve seen people enjoy the Freewrite Traveler (though it’s not for me): [1] https://getfreewrite.com/products/freewrite-traveler https://getfreewrite.com/products/freewrite-traveler
  - dalbasal 6y ago
    I'm skeptical about the narrow horizontal screen. I'd actually prefer in oriented the vertically for writing.
  - cmiller1 6y ago
    Would love this jailbroken, a text dedicated device would be wonderful for coding, terminal emulation, even e-mail.
    - as_ 6y ago
      This? https://www.clockworkpi.com https://www.clockworkpi.com
      - cmiller1 6y ago
        While that does look nice it lacks what I consider the killer feature of the above device: e-ink display, and with it the benefits of reduced eye strain and enhanced battery life.
  - mleonhard 6y ago
    That is a very opinionated writing tool. It has no arrow keys. Does it support editing, or only writing?
ingend88 6y ago
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.
dh-g 6y ago
Nice job and thanks for the mention.
clash 6y ago
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/ https://framelabs.eu/en/
- ingend88 6y ago
  Can you also use it to send real-time messages ?
  - clash 6y ago
    You can configure it to poll for messages on a fixed interval. Pushing is not possible since it would sacrifice the battery life.
    - ingend88 6y ago
      What if you could build this product but to also allow for the direct power supply connection ?
      - clash 6y ago
        There is a micro-USB connector on the back which you could just permanently hook up to a power supply. When the battery life is not part of the equation anymore, making push available is not a problem.
- ingend88 6y ago
  I would love to buy it if you can provide a way to push the message.
heroHACK17 6y ago
Nice! I have always wanted to build one of these for my car. Can you report on the latency of your dashboard?
cmiller1 6y ago
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.
rijoja 6y ago
Which models of the Kindle can be jailbroken?
jrockway 6y ago
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".
- progman32 6y ago
  It's possible to refresh e-ink without a global flash if you are careful and have a clever controller. I don't think this video directly addresses this but it gives a good overview on the problem space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsbiO8EAsGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsbiO8EAsGw
  - jrockway 6y ago
    Yeah, I've seen Ben's video but used a different controller and didn't get very good results with my (very cursory) tweaks to the various tables that controlled the refresh.
- PascalW 6y ago
  That's a good point. I'm using partial refresh for this reason, which works quite well because the screen is relatively static (I do a full refresh after 4 partial refreshes, to remove the minor ghosting that does occur). But if your dashboard shows a lot of different content you'll have to do full refreshes, which on the Kindle at least also cause a flash.
Hopka 6y ago
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 https://github.com/janhapke/screendle
borzunov 6y ago
Reminded me of the tool turning Pocketbook E-Ink readers into computer monitors, which I made several years ago: https://github.com/borzunov/remoteink 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.

284 points by PascalW 6y ago

girishso 6y ago

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

PascalW 6y ago
You do need the screen to kick off the jailbreak process I'm afraid.

KaiserPro 6y ago

This is excellent work, well done!

keyle 6y ago

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.

PascalW 6y ago
Yeah they seem to actively prevent jailbreaking on more recent devices. I specifically picked up a used Kindle 4 NT for this project, because it's so easy to jailbreak.
drran 6y ago
Try Onix Boox. They have stock Android. Some of them have internal SD card, which is easy to replace with your own.

figbert 6y ago

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.

codesternews 6y ago

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

PascalW 6y ago
https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle4NTHacking https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle4NTHacking and the mobileread forums have a wealth of information on this topic!

bergie 6y ago

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

jcun4128 6y ago
I am thinking about this (e-paper) but drive it from an ESP (preferably 01) and connect it to a battery where it could last say months/years that would be nice. I was able to do a hardware mod someone posted where you can put it into a self-wake deep sleep if that makes sense for power saving. Otherwise I currently do desktop notifications/speech text. I have a basic Kindle too (paper?) And it's amazing the battery life.
- PascalW 6y ago
  I considered this as well but didn't really want to mess with the hardware. But if you're up for that you can buy the components yourself, or go for something like inkplate [1] which is an E-paper display + ESP microcontroller and battery in one package. [1] https://inkplate.io/ https://inkplate.io/
  - jcun4128 6y ago
    $100? hmm this price may not be that bad though, considering the display seems to be the most expensive aspect and I'm not finding a similar price/size on Amazon. One thing I want to learn/address personally is a charging circuit so I'd rather build it myself. Still it is nice to know this is out there ready to go. Also I have to use these ESP01's I bought haha. The code itself I imagine wouldn't be difficult eg. an http get request firing at whatever interval to your own local/remote endpoint. Would have to see about the ESP driver part to display to eInk.
    - jpgleeson 6y ago
      The price definitely seems great for the size of the display, but it might be worth looking at the Waveshare e-paper displays if you want to do something a bit more DIY.

CGamesPlay 6y ago

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

PascalW 6y ago
Yes that should be possible. You could use this as a starting point: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3812831&postcount=2 https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3812831&pos.... With that you can wait for the 'goingToScreenSaver' event and then write your dashboard to the screen. There are some minor downsides though. If you keep the built-in Kindle UI running it will draw a menubar on the screen when the Wi-Fi connection status changes and power consumption will be a bit higher with this setup. All in all still a good tradeoff if you want to keep using the Kindle for it's original purpose too. Edit: someone else posted a link to this tool which does exactly this: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=236104 https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=236104

makepanic 6y ago

That's cool. I've build a similar thing for my kindle. https://github.com/makepanic/eink-weather 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.

spuz 6y ago

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

PascalW 6y ago
I don't know exactly yet, but from what I'm now seeing it consumes 3-4% battery per day, with the dashboard updating every 30 minutes for 10 hours a day. I'm only letting it update during office hours, so I reckon I should get around a month of battery life with this usage.
- spuz 6y ago
  That is great. A month of usage is what I would consider acceptable for this kind of product.

firasd 6y ago

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

sinstein 6y ago
Some time ago Das Keyboard launched a keyboard where each individual led could be configured to light up on the basis of some external input. https://www.daskeyboard.com/p/5q-cloud-connected-rgb-mechanical-keyboard/ https://www.daskeyboard.com/p/5q-cloud-connected-rgb-mechani... So you could theoretically bind Slack status to a key (say your F1) key and have it turn red when there was an unread message. I think that was/is a great solution to ambient awareness
theshrike79 6y ago
> Would be cool if there was a cheap always-on tablet that could display arbitrary web widgets like a calendar, slack etc You can do this with any $100 Android tablet or - to a lesser degree - a left-over iPad that's too old for anything relevant. Software-wise you have a bunch of options: Magic Mirror and Home Assistant are the most common ones. Dakboard works as a SaaS solution without their custom hardware, the free option is way too limited. HA is more for home automation though and Magic Mirror's actual purpose is to mount the display behind a two-way mirror (thus the "Magic" part) I've got a cheapo chinese dual boot Atom Windows/Android tablet mounted on my kitchen wall with an analog clock, our shared family calendar, Netatmo data (indoor+outdoor) and weather forecast. Works like a charm. If it wasn't so crappy I could use something like Kiosk Browser[1] to have it use the front-facing camera and only turn the display on when it detects motion. Now I just use Tasker to turn the display off at night and dim it during evenings. A bunch of people are just mounting old computer monitors on the wall and using a Rasperry Pi (Zero/2/3/4) as a kiosk-browser. The Wife Acceptance Factor is a bit lower on those though. Most likely you'd need to disassemble the display and add some fancy frames. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.ozerov.fully&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.ozerov.full...

htk 6y ago

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.

bovermyer 6y ago
Agreed. This is both clever and simple, a rare combo.
safog 6y ago
I think this has been the standard approach for all e-ink displays that have been floating around (both homemade and commercial). So, yeah, I appreciate it but it's not specifically innovative in this regard.
- rakoo 6y ago
  Sometimes you need to tune down innovation and just finish your project
kevincox 6y ago
The only real downsize is that text rendering engines like to know the display pixel layout. However for the display on the kindle it probably isn't a major concern. On the other hand HTML is nice because you could use the same code on two differently sized devices (to an extent).

tluyben2 6y ago

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

PascalW 6y ago
Might be a nice fit indeed. I considered doing this on my Remarkable 2, but it's a bit tricky to combine a dashboard with actually using the product as it's intended (for note-taking, in this case). The advantage of using a Kindle like this is that it's cheap enough that I don't have to use it for anything else. I bought the Kindle used for €25.

sradman 6y ago

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.

PascalW 6y ago
That's an interesting idea! It depends a bit on the data that is shown on the dashboard, but I guess in many cases the data is quite static. The data on my dashboard can change at any time in theory, but there are many times where the data remains the same for 2-3 hours.
tyingq 6y ago
The ht program doesn't appear to support conditional downloads. It also doesn't support a HEAD request, which is odd, as it supports GET, POST, PUT, PATH, DELETE. With a HEAD request, you could do the Etag or Last-Modified comparison yourself. I suppose you could just download the image and do a "diff -q" or compare an MD5 checksum, or even just file size. Or use a different tool maybe? I see that rural supports head requests. https://crates.io/crates/rural https://crates.io/crates/rural Edit: Appears that ht may be able to get response headers. It's sort of a documentation bug. It has a -p/--print option, but the README doesn't document what the arguments are. Found it.. "ht -p h https://google.com https://google.com" returns the headers, so you could extract the Etag or Last-Modified header.
- sradman 6y ago
  HTTPie supports headers using header-name:value CLI parameters; I didn't check whether ht supports these. You would have to save the proper response header between requests. The question then turns to how the 304 Not Modified response is handled.
  - deleted 6y ago

dalbasal 6y ago

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.

jbarrow 6y ago
In terms of a Kindle-like laptop for writing, I’ve seen people enjoy the Freewrite Traveler (though it’s not for me): [1] https://getfreewrite.com/products/freewrite-traveler https://getfreewrite.com/products/freewrite-traveler
- dalbasal 6y ago
  I'm skeptical about the narrow horizontal screen. I'd actually prefer in oriented the vertically for writing.
- cmiller1 6y ago
  Would love this jailbroken, a text dedicated device would be wonderful for coding, terminal emulation, even e-mail.
  - as_ 6y ago
    This? https://www.clockworkpi.com https://www.clockworkpi.com
    - cmiller1 6y ago
      While that does look nice it lacks what I consider the killer feature of the above device: e-ink display, and with it the benefits of reduced eye strain and enhanced battery life.
- mleonhard 6y ago
  That is a very opinionated writing tool. It has no arrow keys. Does it support editing, or only writing?

ingend88 6y ago

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.

dh-g 6y ago

Nice job and thanks for the mention.

clash 6y ago

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/ https://framelabs.eu/en/

ingend88 6y ago
Can you also use it to send real-time messages ?
- clash 6y ago
  You can configure it to poll for messages on a fixed interval. Pushing is not possible since it would sacrifice the battery life.
  - ingend88 6y ago
    What if you could build this product but to also allow for the direct power supply connection ?
    - clash 6y ago
      There is a micro-USB connector on the back which you could just permanently hook up to a power supply. When the battery life is not part of the equation anymore, making push available is not a problem.
ingend88 6y ago
I would love to buy it if you can provide a way to push the message.

heroHACK17 6y ago

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

cmiller1 6y ago

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.

rijoja 6y ago

Which models of the Kindle can be jailbroken?

jrockway 6y ago

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".

progman32 6y ago
It's possible to refresh e-ink without a global flash if you are careful and have a clever controller. I don't think this video directly addresses this but it gives a good overview on the problem space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsbiO8EAsGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsbiO8EAsGw
- jrockway 6y ago
  Yeah, I've seen Ben's video but used a different controller and didn't get very good results with my (very cursory) tweaks to the various tables that controlled the refresh.
PascalW 6y ago
That's a good point. I'm using partial refresh for this reason, which works quite well because the screen is relatively static (I do a full refresh after 4 partial refreshes, to remove the minor ghosting that does occur). But if your dashboard shows a lot of different content you'll have to do full refreshes, which on the Kindle at least also cause a flash.

Hopka 6y ago

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 https://github.com/janhapke/screendle

borzunov 6y ago

Reminded me of the tool turning Pocketbook E-Ink readers into computer monitors, which I made several years ago: https://github.com/borzunov/remoteink 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.