Tech

4 Very Geeky Ways To Give Your Old Kindle New Life

With this project, your Kindle becomes a clock that tells the time and also shows a literary quote that is changing every minute.

As in the rest of the projects, the first step is to free your Kindle by doing jailbreak to be able to fiddle 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 that need 1,440 images to display with exact time and related appointment.

Luckily the newspaper The Guardian collected from his readers a long time ago a multitude of quotes of this type related to time and it is what its creator, the maker Dutchman Jaap Meijers.

2. A Kindle refrigerator whiteboard that displays your emails

Kindle fridge blackboard

A curious way to take advantage of an old Kindle is to put it in the refrigerator door and that serves as Board for your email messages.

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, show it big like a web page that 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

Smart Home Screen Kindle

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 to say, a screen that you hang in a place in the house and gives you useful information, like the weather, what’s on your agenda and the main news.

You have the detailed instructions on this page and it consists of unlocking your Kindle by doing jailbreak, connect it to Wi-Fi and present 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 (much simpler) option of deploy said server for free on the Heroku platform, instead of creating your own.

4. Use your old Kindle to read and play music scores while you play

Sheet music pin with Kindle

Maybe the most curious way to reuse an old Kindle be this: turn it into a music sheet reader for when you’re playing.

For that, the project is based on build a foot pedal that flips the Kindle page 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 mainly aimed at musicians, it also can be useful for disabled people they can’t 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 do jailbreak to the Kindle and also build the remote 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.

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