If you have a Kindle e-reader that you no longer use, you don’t have to throw it away. The maker community is capable of reusing anything and turning it into what you least imagine and, therefore, today we bring you 4 very geeky ways to give your old Kindle a new life . With a little skill, and following the instructions that we are going to link to, you can do very cool things.
Recently, GoodEreader, the go-to site for everything related to e-ink devices, has compiled several projects from makers who have used their old Kindles for very curious and geeky things. We liked them a lot and that’s why we show them to you too.
From knowing the time to checking your email, here are 4 ways to breathe new life into your old Kindle reader.
1. Use the Kindle for a literary clock
With this project, your Kindle becomes a clock that tells the time and also shows a literary quote that changes every minute.
As in the rest of the projects, the first step is to jailbreak your Kindle to be able to tinker with it. Don’t worry, because you have all the detailed instructions on this page , although in English, yes.
The way it works is very curious. Each day has 1,440 minutes, which means you need 1,440 images to display with the exact time and a related appointment .
Luckily, the newspaper The Guardian collected from its readers a long time ago a multitude of quotes of this type related to time and it is what its creator, the Dutch maker Jaap Meijers uses.
2. A Kindle refrigerator whiteboard that displays your emails
A curious way to take advantage of an old Kindle is to put it on the refrigerator door and serve as a blackboard for your emails .
In this way, the Kindle will notify you of the new emails you have and will show them to you.
For that, you will need an old Kindle, obviously, in addition to a Raspberry. In this, we will configure a web server that checks your email account and, if there is something new, it will show it in a big way as a web page that it sends to the Kindle via Wi-Fi.
You have all the detailed instructions on the page of its creator .
3. Use the old Kindle as a smart display
Another of the simplest utilities that you can give to a Kindle that you no longer use is to be a Smart Home Display . That is, a screen that you hang in a place in the house and gives you useful information , such as the weather, what is on your agenda and the main news.
You have detailed instructions on this page and it consists of jailbrokening your Kindle, connecting it to Wi-Fi and presenting a web page with the most interesting data of the day.
For that, you will need to configure an image server . This can be the most complicated part if you can’t manage to write code, although the creator has shared his for you to copy and even gives the option (much easier) to deploy said server for free on the Heroku platform , instead of creating one. own.
4. Use your old Kindle to read and play sheet music while you play
Perhaps the most curious way to reuse an old Kindle is this: turn it into a music sheet reader for when you are playing.
For that, the project is based on building a pedal that, activated with the foot, turns the page of the Kindle with the score. So you can easily follow it while you play.
According to the creator of the project (who did it for his brother, who plays in a band), although this project is aimed primarily at musicians, it can also be useful for disabled people who cannot turn the pages by hand.
In fact, the device supports any type of button. You have all the instructions on the project page and it is the one that most requires you to be a handyman. You have to jailbreak the Kindle and also build the controller with two buttons and an ESP8266 Wi-Fi chip.
As you can see, there is a bit of everything and for all tastes. So you know, nothing is thrown away here and your old Kindle can be, again, something very useful in your daily life.