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.)
>an interposing dongle [$25 on sale!] which provides a Bluetooth receiver and app that lets you set arbitrary preferences on your phone and fast charge, slow charge, or turn off the charger at configurable state of charge setpoints or times
And I saw your recommendation elsewhere in the previous discussion I dug up (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31841051#31842078) because someone mentioned that power cycling the battery on a timer would still eventually encounter the same problem.
>Trades one problem for another. Now you are cycling the battery frequently which is going to do the same thing in the end.
Author here: Thanks for the suggestion. I do have a wifi smart plug and I can take a look at this near trick. So far it's easier to charge it once a month as it runs fine for 2-3 weeks in one charge.
>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?
I built this dashboard. The price curves and text are rendered locally from the microcontroller and painted pixel by pixel. Letters use raster fonts stored locally, price curves are generated on the fly. It can be done, it takes a bit of care. Mine only has ~400KB memory. It must be a lot easier on the Kindle, I think it runs Java even.
Thanks for sharing your project, it is very cool! I'll check it out and see if I can get it to work.
Kindle is very hackable if you're ready to endure some weird quirks. E.g. You can install Python on kindle or do custom software using various tools like Gcc, clang, Perl etc.
It is definitely possible to draw the images on the Kindle client, e.g. KoReader does that. I've mentioned 2 different ways in the article FBInk and Kindlet. I found it a bit cumbersome to use these tools and the tooling is bit iffy. It was easier for me to just download it from the server.
I'm just curious about the best way to generate a dashboard image locally without invoking a web browser -- I'm quite terrible at web programming and would be much more comfortable with ImageMagick or even troff.
I expected the Kindle to do a few api calls and call ImageMagick but instead, in Cloudflare, it sets up a headless browser, and renders a web page to a PNG file on the server, and then only the final png image gets returned to the Kindle.
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...
Same, same. I picked up a couple of used ones at an estate sale and I just want them as e-ink tablets. It's weird to me that there's no from-the-ground-up total firmware replacement for these.
Reminds me of those times I work with temperature sensors which report in eighths of a degree. 3 decimal places to give less than one decimal place of precision. You can round, but somehow that doesn't feel right.
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.
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
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.
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.
Are you aware of a school that proactively declares that they accept such donations?
Speaking in my volunteer post as the coordinator of a makerspace electronics lab, we were buried in e-waste "abandonations" (someone literally unloaded a pickup truck full of mouse-eaten boxes of plastic junk outside our door one morning, and it took us a week of volunteer hours to dispose of it all properly) until we got very aggressive about requiring advance approval by the appropriate coordinator.
No, but I've been campaigning at university where I teach to do it. As you may expect - very few people at academia do bold moves just out of love for knowledge these days. So, perhaps, I'm going to have to do it myself sooner or later.
I believe the tagline should be - "welcome to the hackaton. you live in a post-singularity world where only legacy chips are available, and the establishment controls all the silicon producing facilities. your job is to bring equipment back to live in order to help the resistance"
Of course the entry exam is having students spend a day without mobiles, in order to get used to this reality :D
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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.)
>an interposing dongle [$25 on sale!] which provides a Bluetooth receiver and app that lets you set arbitrary preferences on your phone and fast charge, slow charge, or turn off the charger at configurable state of charge setpoints or times
Another option I learned about just now for Macbooks: https://github.com/AppHouseKitchen/AlDente-Charge-Limiter (macOS 11+; $25 Pro version)
And I saw your recommendation elsewhere in the previous discussion I dug up (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31841051#31842078) because someone mentioned that power cycling the battery on a timer would still eventually encounter the same problem.
>Trades one problem for another. Now you are cycling the battery frequently which is going to do the same thing in the end.
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?
https://www.asciimx.com/projects/etlas/
Kindle is very hackable if you're ready to endure some weird quirks. E.g. You can install Python on kindle or do custom software using various tools like Gcc, clang, Perl etc.
1: https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Python_on_Kindle
2: https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle_Hacks_Information#Ki...
[1]: https://github.com/NiLuJe/FBInk
[2]: https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindlet_Index
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 :)
I appreciate finding that site as well, but I thought it strange that I couldn't find a "why jailbreak" section. Does anyone here know?
I don't want Amazon's spying on me so I have just kept it in Airplane mode since I bought it 9 years ago. It seems to work fine ¯\(ツ)/¯
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
So now it’s a waiting game to see when the new method for the latest firmware will be ready for the public.
Speaking in my volunteer post as the coordinator of a makerspace electronics lab, we were buried in e-waste "abandonations" (someone literally unloaded a pickup truck full of mouse-eaten boxes of plastic junk outside our door one morning, and it took us a week of volunteer hours to dispose of it all properly) until we got very aggressive about requiring advance approval by the appropriate coordinator.
I believe the tagline should be - "welcome to the hackaton. you live in a post-singularity world where only legacy chips are available, and the establishment controls all the silicon producing facilities. your job is to bring equipment back to live in order to help the resistance"
Of course the entry exam is having students spend a day without mobiles, in order to get used to this reality :D