Thread: Kindle Touch hardware modding
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Old 06-18-2012, 09:19 AM   #2
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Quote:
Originally Posted by leonard.pitzu View Post
edit1: if somebody is want's to do this please contact me and i will post/send detailed instructions on how to do it (or at least how i did it).

This is my first post so please bear with me :-)

I've got a Kindle Touch (Wifi version) and after some playing around with it had an crazy modding idea. It's useless but it's still nice to do so here i am sharing this ideea.
A while ago i built a weather station (complete with all kinds of sersors, logging, graphs, symbian, android, google chrome and mozilla firefox apps, etc.). Cool but what if i am somewhere remote and i want to see the temperature or the pressure. Maybe altitude? What if i could do this using my Kindle. Now i can (and hopefully You will also do :-) )!
The basic idea behind is to have a sensor and a small microcontroller that reads the sensor data. On request this data is sent to the Kindle which displays it on the e-ink screen. I have choosen a BMP085 pressure/temperature sensors. Out of this data i can also compute the altitude. The sensor is hooked on to a modified Arduino Pro Mini board (i ripped aff the power supply and the LED's in order to get a "low power" gadget. No the tricky part was the communication with the Kindle. The Touches have a serial port but this one is the linux console. I took a radical approach and disabled the console (just remove /etc/init/console.conf) leaving the kernel debug messages (i just ignore this messages).
From the functional point of view the small bard i designed is almost all the time in power down. When a byte of data is received on the serial port the bard wakes up and checks if the message received has a known format (e.g. data request). If it does it sends the sensor data and then goes back into power down. On the Kindle side this process is triggered using a WAF application. This launches a bash script which does all the communication part with the board. The received data is saved to a local file which is then opened by the web app itself, parsed and graphicaly displayed.
I hope that someone will find this modification as fun as i did and maybe come up with a better, cooler idea.

Attached are some pics and the code. It's free to use/reuse but keep in mind: I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR BRICKING YOUR DEVICES. YOU NEED TO KNOW HARDWARE, SOFTWARE AND TECHNICAL STUFF IN GENERAL TO BE ABLE TO DO THIS MODIFICATIONS!!!!
Awesome! Why don't you place the details into a mobileread wiki page?

This earned the 2600 "geekmaster creativity award" karma upgrade. Hmm... I thought I saw "karma = 10" before posting this, but when I went to add karma, it was already over 1900, so I just gave the max karma that I can, instead.
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