Kindle Side Card
Turn an old Kindle into a local e-ink side display
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Kindle Side Card - Turn an old Kindle into a local e-ink side display

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Open-source local-first dashboard for jailbroken Kindles. A Python daemon renders a Kindle-native PNG; KUAL pulls it over Wi-Fi and paints it with eips. Built for slow, glanceable status, not another browser tab.

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Hunter
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I built this because a browser dashboard is still a browser: bright, interactive, and one click away from another tab. Kindle Side Card is intentionally weaker. It uses slow e-ink for ambient state like todos, system status, AI usage gauges, calendar snippets, messages, PR queues, and notes. It is experimental: PW1 / 5th gen is the first tested target, jailbreak + KUAL are required, and the current visuals are renderer-generated until real device photos come in. GitHub:
Hunter

Concrete workflow: put an old Kindle next to your main monitor and use it as the “what should I look at next?” screen.

For me the useful version is not a pretty dashboard. It is a quiet status card for today’s focus item, the next calendar block, waiting PRs, unread message count, local build status, and AI agent/token status.

That is the whole point: visible enough to keep you oriented, too slow and weak to become another distraction.

If you have a jailbreakable Kindle in a drawer, try the GitHub repo and star/watch it if you want more Kindle models and widgets supported:

Hunter

The strongest signal so far is not Product Hunt yet, it is Reddit: the r/eink post hit about 8.8K views and the first real question was basically, "can I use my old Kindles instead of paying for TRMNL?"

That is exactly the wedge. Kindle Side Card is still experimental, but the architecture is deliberately boring: host renders a PNG, Kindle fetches it over local Wi-Fi, KUAL/eips paints it.

Slow, local, useful.