GLdashboard: Giving New Life to Nook Glowlight

[GLdashboard]

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share a project I've been working on that turns an old Nook GL4 into an always-on information dashboard. The inspiration was simple - I had this e-reader gathering dust and thought it could be repurposed to display useful information throughout the day.

The dashboard shows:
- Current weather and 5-day forecast
- Latest news headlines
- Major stock indices (S&P 500, NASDAQ, DOW)
- Upcoming holidays
- Date, time, and battery level

Since I wanted to mount the Nook on a wall as a clean information display without any charging cables, power management became crucial. The most challenging (and interesting) part was getting this to work properly. The device's deep sleep mode (power_enhance_enable) is incredibly effective at conserving battery, but getting it to wake reliably for updates was a real puzzle. After days of experimenting with various wake approaches (AlarmManager, WakeLocks, etc.), I finally discovered a method that could reliably wake the device without root. It took a lot of log analysis and trial-and-error, but now it works consistently - waking every 45 minutes to fetch new data, then returning to deep sleep.

The result? About two weeks of battery life while staying updated throughout the day. Potentially could get it to to last three weeks or a month by disabling updates at night.

Currently running on a Nook GL4, but could potentially work on GL3 and other e-ink Android devices with similar power management capabilities.

Would love to hear if others would find this useful or have suggestions for additional features. Gauging interest to see if I should polish it up more. Some ideas I'm considering:
- An option to display an image slideshow instead of the dashboard
- Pressing button to turn on backlight for ~5 seconds to read information at night
- Countdowns, to-do lists, sales tracker, etc.
-Landscape orientation


For the developers out there - if you've worked with deep sleep states on this device, I'd be particularly interested in hearing if you were successful getting the device to wake from deep sleep without touching the hardware keys or the screen.

Let me know your thoughts!
Just a note, used AI to touch up the images a bit so the buttons/logos might look a bit weird.

[GLdashboard]

[Renate]

That's pretty nice looking.

I don't really like battery operated devices in fixed operation.
So in this Glow3 I removed the battery and wired the USB so it comes out the back.
The cable goes through a microphone gooseneck into the wall.
It doesn't use WiFi, it just takes updates from my home systems Raspberry Pi over USB.
Since it's a clock, it updates on the minute.

[GLdashboard]

Thanks for sharing your approach! That's really cool and neat with no visible cables. Could probably program the light to go on all night as well since you don't have to worry about battery drain. A great solution for a device you no longer read on.

Regarding the project I was working on - I've since discovered TRMNL, an e-ink dashboard solution that's even more versatile than my original project. TRMNL offers hundreds of plugins for displaying everything from stocks and weather to quotes and poems. Instead of continuing on my own custom dashboard, I decided to leverage their existing platform.

The implementation was surprisingly straightforward - essentially just grabbing an image from their server or a your own TRMNL server. But the real game-changer is the extensive plugin ecosystem. It transforms the Nook into a dynamic, customizable information display. Much easier than having to connect all the different APIs and whatnot in my own application.

I've attached some images to show what it looks like. Anyone interested can check out the project on GitHub under trmnl-nook.

[GLdashboard]

Here's the link to the GitHub: https://github.com/usetrmnl/trmnl-nook