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by politelemon 996 days ago
I repurpose all my old ereaders (Kindles and Kobos) into displays for something, weather, agendas, some even do images (albeit very low resolution). It's great to have these around the house, quietly doing their thing.

One thing I will point out from observation, the radios on ereader devices aren't great for heavy use; they were originally created for occasional syncing. Projects like these will require an HTTP request to somewhere to fetch data, on a regular basis, and the radio eventually stops working. It's not a terrible thing considering it's just an unused device. If you're looking for something longer lived, the waveshare screen are worth considering for mini projects.

2 comments

I don't think the resolution is the problem with images on e-readers, but the amount of grayscale levels is.

Dithering works brilliantly on these devices. I made a photo frame out of one of these by calling some imagemagick from golang.

Nice result.

I agree, dithering on these devices works really well. After this project I worked on displaying images of the sun from the NOAA satellite. Until I got dithering working displaying the image with just 4 levels of grey was was very lackluster.

Resolution is more important than grayscale for e-ink - not only are they two sides of the same coin for dithering, but e-ink renders far faster in black-and-white so with sufficient resolution you've got a snappier page turn.
I want to repurpose an older Kobo as a multipurpose boardgame accessory (e.g. with dice, a bunch of custom card decks, etc.)

Do you have any pointers on where to start?

Kobo are super easy to hack. There are a lot of examples in the mobileread forum: https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kobo_eReader_hacks#Writing_...