README.md

Rusty Kindle

My personal standalone kindle dashboard made using rust.

Features

• 3 day weather prediction from openweathermap
• Local rain radar from BOM
• Financial data from FRED
• Current linux desktop share from statscounter
• Time till next bitcoin halving from blockchain.info
• Next event in my google calendar using the google calendar api
• News from r/worldnews
• Current time (hour on top, minute on bottom)
• Incredibly non-future proof (more scraping than apis)

Setup

This display is not really for "the general public", but if you live in australia (radar was only meant for aussies), have a kindle, and want a (likely) unstable dashboard, heres the setup:

Requirements

You will need a jailbroken kindle with ssh enabled. Make sure that it has xrandr, eips, and tmux. Should work on almost any kindle that has these scripts, but I've only tested on a kindle paperwhite 5th gen.

Building

0. git clone this repo.
1. Install rust/cargo & Cross and build the project with: RUSTFLAGS="-C target-feature=+crt-static" cross build --target arm-unknown-linux-musleabi --release. This is the only reliable way of building for the kindle.

Config

We have three things we needs to configure for all the information in the dashboard to be fetched. This information is stored in a folder named sensitive/, which you should find at the root of the repo you just cloned, and is where the following will be stored in the kindle.

1. ICS Calendars Google calendar - You can export your google calendars as ics urls (Calendar Settings -> Integrate calendar -> Secret address in iCal format). Save them to sensitive/calendars.json as {"urls": ["<eg url>", ...]}

2. OpenWeatherMap - Create an API account. Save the api token in sensitive/openweatherkey.json as {"key":"MYKEY"}

3. Bom radar location - Save the bom weather station (eg, IDR713 for Sydney) in sensitive/bom.json as {"station": "STATIONID"}

Moving

We will use scp and ssh to transfer the files.

change KINDLE_ADDR to your kindle's address!

1. SSH into your kindle: ssh root@KINDLE_ADDR
2. (Likely) enable disk read/write: mntroot rw
3. Create a folder that will hold our binary and the config files: mkdir /dash /dash/sensitive && cd /dash
4. Back on the host machine, move our configs: scp -r sensitive/ root@KINDLE_ADDR:/dash/
5. And our binary: scp target/arm-unknown-linux-musleabi/release/kindle root@KINDLE_ADDR:/dash/kindle_screen to the kindle

Running

0. SSH to the kindle
1. Disable the status bar (if you have one?): lipc-set-prop com.lab126.pillow disableEnablePillow disable
2. Turn off the backlight: echo -n 0 > /sys/devices/system/fl_tps6116x/fl_tps6116x0/fl_intensity
3. Run: tmux
4. Then, start the dashboard with: cd /dash/ && ./kindle_screen
5. Check that all data could be fetched and no errors were shown. The kindle should clear it's screen and eventually show the dashboard.
6. Detach and leave running with ctrl+a, then d.

Wait while the kindle spends two minutes using all it's cpu cycles to render a 1200x900 svg every 15 minutes.

Killing

1. On the kindle, run: killall kindle_screen and/or tmux kill-server

Caveats

• You really should check through the logs on the initial run for any misconfigs / failed runs / incomplete data (step 3 of running).
• The radar is scraped from BOM ("Australian" Bureau of Meteorology) - only Australian locations supported.
• Very unstable and not future proof, but at least it shouldn't all break at the same time thanks to rust.
• No "low power mode" with screenshots or sleepmode. Best to keep the kindle plugged in.

TODO

• Caching so we don't need to fetch the linux kernel version / weather / FRED data every 15 minutes.
• Switching the calendar api to receiving updates rather than continous polling.
• Moving from tux to something like systemd.

Personal Notes

This is my first "real" project in Rust. Expect bugs and poorly written code. Otherwise, I really like this language! I'm not really a rustacean, but I'm slowly getting there.

Also, for any others following in my footsteps, the kindle is more like an embedded device rather than a raspberry pi - don't expect a lot (if any) from it, and definately don't try web-engine based rendering.

Stats

git ls-files '**/*.rs' | xargs wc -l

Lines	File
101	src/calendar.rs
90	src/main.rs
67	src/news.rs
121	src/radar.rs
610	src/renderer.rs
61	src/stats.rs
68	src/stats/btc.rs
29	src/stats/halving.rs
42	src/stats/linear_rg.rs
26	src/stats/linux.rs
27	src/stats/linux_version.rs
70	src/stats/spx.rs
64	src/stats/yield_spread.rs
60	src/utils.rs
120	src/weather.rs
1556	total