Hemant Kumar Saves a Kindle Paperwhite 7 From the Junk Drawer with This Weather Dashboard Project
Breaking out of Amazon's walled garden, Kumar turned an old forgotten eReader into an always-on low-power weather dashboard.
Senior software developer Hemant Kumar has given an older Amazon Kindle, no longer needed as an eReader, a new lease of life — by jailbreaking it and connecting it to a Bun-based Node.js server to create a low-power always-on weather dashboard.
"Most of us have a drawer (or a box) stuffed with old gadgets—a sort of tech graveyard we can’t quite bring ourselves to throw out," Kumar says by way of background. "One day, while rummaging through my stash of dusty chargers and questionable cables, I found my trusty Kindle Paperwhite 7. It had faithfully delivered countless stories but eventually got sidelined for an iPad. Rather than letting it fade into oblivion, I decided to transform it into something fresh and genuinely useful: a minimalist, long-running weather dashboard."
Amazon's Kindle family of eReaders are based on electrophoretic E Ink displays — meaning they're sunlight-readable and low-power, with the display only needing energy in order to change states. They're also relatively locked-down, designed as they are for use with Amazon's digital ecosystem. Inspired by an earlier project by Pascal Widdershoven, Kumar wanted to break out of that walled garden — so looked up step-by-step guides to jailbreaking the embedded Linux-based operating system and gaining root access.
Some third-party applications added full Wi-Fi network connectivity with Secure SHell (SSH) access, which was key to the project — providing the kind of access required to disable the built-in book-reading services, and ensure that the system runs in a battery-saving low-speed mode with a disabled screensaver, in favor of a script designed to pull down and display weather dashboard imagery from a remote server.
"I built the server piece with Bun (yes, that shiny new JavaScript environment) and Playwright for some scraping wizardry," Kumar explains. "Containerized with Docker, it uses Playwright to capture a screenshot of Environment Canada’s weather page (because who doesn’t love scraping government websites?), processes the image with Sharp, and serves it through a lightweight Express.js server. The trickiest part was getting the image right for the Kindle Paperwhite 7."
The project is documented in full, with links to look up the jailbreaking process for a particular model of Kindle, on Kumar's blog; the source code has been published on GitHub under the permissive MIT license.