Kindle Office Dashboard

Purpose

The jailbroken Kindle is assigned as a permanent office e-ink display. Hermes can send text, grayscale PNG images, dashboards, and experimental typing/animation frames to it over SSH on the trusted home LAN.

Verified device

Kindle firmware: 5.18.1
Architecture: ARMv7 / armv7l
LAN address used: 192.168.68.125
Access: root SSH currently works interactively; credentials are intentionally not recorded here.
Existing Kindle software: KOReader, KUAL, KTerm, BusyBox, eips.
Root filesystem: read-only; work is kept under /mnt/us.

Verified display methods

eips -c clears the screen.
eips X Y "text" draws text; the observed coordinate behavior is pixel-like, with increasing Y moving downward.
Small direct text updates use partial refreshes and produce useful terminal-like ghosting/typing animation.
eips -g IMAGE -f -W displays a PNG with a full refresh.
A 600x800 grayscale PNG is the reliable native portrait image format.
Landscape content requires rendering an 800x600 page, rotating it into a 600x800 PNG, displaying it, and physically turning the Kindle sideways.

Reusable local scripts

Located in /Users/adolforeyna/bin/:

kindle-show — send text using the local renderer.
kindle-send-image — send a PNG and display it with eips.
kindle-render.py — render text to a grayscale PNG.
kindle-ui / kindle-ui.py — render/send a bordered dashboard UI.
kindle-keep-awake — toggle or inspect the Kindle screensaver prevention state.
kindle-type-landscape — render a rotated landscape text page.
kindle-png-type-landscape — experimental cumulative rotated-PNG animation; not yet end-to-end verified because the Kindle's unusual empty-password SSH prompt interferes with binary streaming.

SSH key status

The Mac public key was written to /mnt/us/ssh/authorized_keys, but passwordless authentication was not accepted. The SSH daemon's configured authorized-key path still needs discovery. Do not change the read-only root filesystem or record the Kindle password. Until fixed, use the existing interactive SSH path for sending.

Current direction

Keep the Kindle permanently in the office and use it as a quiet family/household task dashboard. Prefer simple scripts over a new MCP server. Use grayscale, high contrast, modest refresh frequency, and full refreshes between substantially different dashboard pages to manage ghosting. Direct partial updates remain best for typing-style experiments.

Progress log — 2026-08-12

Confirmed portrait text updates and vertical coordinates.
Confirmed direct partial-refresh typing animation.
Confirmed rotated landscape bitmap rendering.
Confirmed image transfer/display through kindle-send-image with a live eips -g full refresh.
Attempted individual cumulative PNG animation; blocked only by SSH authentication/stream ordering, not PNG rendering.

3.0 KiB Raw Permalink Blame History