1st gen N416 - want to send text to display via USB

[Uncle_ToyBox]

I'm working on a virtual pinball machine and want to have a separate screen to display rules for each game.
I dug my old N416 Kobo out of the box of assorted electronics and realize it's still on v1.0 of the software (haven't been able to upgrade it).

What I want to do is push either a text or image file to the screen via USB. It looks like newer e-readers can install a VNC client that would do the job but not the ancient beast I've got here.

I've found a thread where someone appears to have hacked it but it goes a little over my head. https://gist.github.com/RandomInsano/6a2de40f71c8580b79621f4699d3595e

What I'd like to have is a command that I could send with a variable (the file to display) to update the screen on demand (no more often than once every 30 seconds at most).

The source machine I'm running is on Windows 10. Any help I could get would be greatly appreciated.

[NiLuJe]

Fair warning: Jumping to a Kobo Touch will save you a lot (and I mean, *a lot*) of hassle).

This is before my time in Kobo-land, but it's in theory similar to what's done on the Kindle 2 (except, much, much worse), possibly the Kindle 1, but since that's also before my time, that's pure conjecture on my part.

So, in increasing order of complexity, you've got:

* Hope that pickel was already implemented on 1.0, as you should be able to feed it a gzipped framebuffer dump somehow (it's 4bpp). Nowadays, it's used to display the boot logo among other things, so, poke into the init scripts, see if something like that exists.

* Delve into the madness that would be trying to plug into the custom Qt4 platform, which, for a start, involves replicating that same setup and toolchain (so, say goodbye to Windows). Good luck.

* Write something custom that talks to the kernel directly. The sources are available with the rest of the Kobo kernels, and the driver is awful, but in there. c.f., include/video/einkio.h & drivers/video/einkfb.c for the kernel stuff, and, as an example, the einkfb implementation in FBInk for an userland interaction with the aforementioned much nicer Kindle driver ).