Hacking an old Kindle to display bus arrival times

Hacking an old Kindle to display bus arrival times

This is how I turned an old Kindle (Kindle Touch 4th Generation/K5/KT) into a live bus feed that refreshes every minute with the option to exit out of dashboard mode by pressing the menu button. It’s basically TRMNL without the $140 price tag.

The high level steps are:

Jailbreak your kindle Install KUAL & MRPI Setup SSH Run a server accessible over the internet (or locally) that serves the Kindle image Create a KUAL app

1. Jailbreaking your Kindle

This will be your Kindle hacking bible for steps 1 - 3. You need to figure out what version of Kindle you have, its firmware version (shorthand FW in the Kindle forum guides + readmes), download the appropriate tar file and follow jailbreak instructions.

Once you’ve successfully jailbroken your Kindle, it’s time to install some things.

2. Installing KUAL & MRPI

KUAL is a custom Kindle app launcher. MRPI allows us to install custom apps onto the Kindle (you may not need MRPI if you have a newer Kindle). This part was frustrating - reading through forum threads gives me a headache. The most helpful resource I found was the Kindle modding wiki. Maybe other people aren’t as oblivious as me but it took me half a day to realize that the “next step” in each guide can be accessed by clicking the “Next Step” button at the bottom of the page.

A gotcha for me was that I had to follow the Setting up a Hotfix guide before attempting to install KUAL & MRPI.

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