Hello from aspiring Kindle-Dev/Hacker

[Crissi]

Hello I am Crissi

I have been amazed by e-ink displays for a while and got some K4s off of ebay for cheap to play around with.

Originally I thought: worst case I remove the eink screen and solder it onto a raspberry pie (seen people do it) but then I realized that you can "just" jailbreak them.

This is how I ended up here.

I have been lurking the past couple of months and finally came around to making my own account here.

I love how much indepth information is available here!

Well I owned 2 K4 because I had some plans of making a big... poster? screen? thing? that can connect to an android phone via wifi hotspot and display whatever I want.

Things escalated and bidding on E-bay was alot of fun, so now I am the proud owner of... I think 11 Amazon Kindles and 3 Kobo Ereaders.

I jail breaked all of them (well those who work) and gave them names, they are now my friends who will aid me in my quest for world domination. Well I am ok with settling for making cool stuff with e-ink displays for time being.

It started when Amazon had a sale and I thought "oh its not 130€ but only 80 (or was it 90?) for the paperwhite 4 which has backlight (unlike the k4) and is water proof! And I thought to myself, as I was aware the newest firmwares cant be jailbroken, that probably they sold off the old model... which was just lying around in some rack in amazons storage facility - so I hopefully will have a breakable Firmware Version! And it was true!

but before it arrived - I swear I dont even remember how it happened - I ended up on ebay, and there were those auctions that had only a couple of hours left on them, so I waited for the last 20 seconds to bid on them...

I did this a couple of times.

I got a PW4 including a case and a K4 for 58€ including shipping. So much for 80-90€ being cheap. Ok it has only the 8GB of storage instead of the 32 but...
sadly it had a too new firmware version to jailbreak, so I gave it to my mom. Originally I was like... well if the firmware version doesn't match I can surely find my own jailbreak *insert mischevious gestures and laughter* but mom is so happy about him so I am not sure if I will ever see him again... Its not like I don't own enough other kindles to play around with, tho...

so I bid on a paperwhite 2 which I paid 45€ for... where I was like dude why would I pay so much money for it when I don't even need him? (I named him Mr. B) But I think it was because my PW4 (His name is Plum) didnt arrive yet so I wasn't sure if I could hack it and this Paperwhite had an old enough Firmware Version...

So I kept bidding. I had 3 K4 in Black, I bought a broken K2 with no battery for 5€ + 5€ shipping.
Then I saw this K4 which didn't turn on and I looked at his sad "please charge me" battery symbol and my motherly instincts kicked in and all I wanted to do was to nurture him back to health... have not been able to revive him as of yet, but I have some ideas. Probably gonna solder a serial port on him and see what uboot speaks. I paid like 6.5€ for it? + 5€ shipping? so not too bad lol

Anyway since it didn't work and this one was grey and I wanted 4 black K4s and I already owned so many kindles that a few more didn't matter anyway I bid on that K4 and got it for 22€ or something and then when I paid I realized: oups thats no K4 its a paperwhite. Welcome Elmo to the family! So naturally I bought another K4 in black for idk 22€ 25? and it works, I jailbroke him and hes called Smarty. The other K4s are called: Marty, Ernie and Bert. The grey one is Farty (or Pupsi in German which sounds 100x cuter).
Also there was this auction for three broken Kobos for 20 somewhat Euros so naturally I bought them to compare them to the Kindles - only had like 1h to research them before the auction ended so it was kind of a bag of surprise. I thought the E-Inks looked ok so worst case I desolder them.

Anyway they came and I attached them to power and they all worked. More or less.
The Kobo Mini had a broken battery: I measured the voltage at the cell and it was only 0.9V
Jup quickly got rid of that guy (kept the protective circuitry tho)
The Kobo Touch N905C works flawlessly - it just has a couple of dead spots on the eink :(
since you can remove its sd card fully tho I replaced it with a Debian image soemone posted in this forum here so I had some fun with that :D

The Kobo Touch N905 has some weird issues which I tested further and my temporary conclusion is that the poor fella is not recognizing touch inputs correctly:
also this model has soldered Memory, so no SD card to replace and I haven't found instructions to properly Jailbreak him yet sadly. Oh well. Also this model doesn't even seem to have a serial port -_- Didn't find any instructions or pictures of it's mainboard that helped me either :/
So he's still a little bit of a problem child.

But anyway - I was wondering how far I can break Amazons Kindle OS and if maybe I can just completely replace it with normal Linux.

I am always so wrapped up in life but I hope I have some spare hours to help you guys develop stuff (Jailbreaks, software, idk) for the Kindle in exchange for help with my Babies.

I am looking forward to talk about tech-nerd-stuff :)

ah yes, I try to read more and I actually use my PW4 (Plum) for reading books atm.
One of the K4 is my designated Kindle of shame, aka holds all of my maths homework (university).
So I will definitely use some of them as e-readers too. (Plan is to make them into fully working Linux tablets - also got myself one awesome bluetooth keyboard to hopefully convince Plum to connect too)

[Sirtel]

Hello and welcome to MobileRead!