PiWrite – Kindle Paperwhite to Write | Hacker News Reader

PiWrite – Kindle Paperwhite to Write

github.com

163 pointskristianpaul49 comments

I went down this rabbit hole two weeks ago, but settled on using a Lenovo ThinkSmart View instead: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/09/22/1230

is it a standard lcd/led display that emits blue light versus the paper white safer one?

It is a standard LCD display with amazing contrast (black is just... black, and I use a white-on-black full screen terminal), although I wouldn't want to get into a debate regarding safety here (let's just say I don't subscribe to pseudo-science).

What makes a standard lcd/led display unsafe?

Marketing materials for a surface treatment on eye glasses.

Yes bad for the eyes. I can use it at night without having to use blue blocking goggles, and not interfere with my sleep quality.

How does the ThinkSmart handle authentication?

I did a little experiment with Samsung Dex to see if the Android-only environment could work. So far - I found it way less distracting not having all my current tabs/finder windows open. I could definitely see it as a nice "writing appliance" that I could put in a quiet corner for the end of the day.

I'm using termux, so I ssh in to a machine where my drafts are (although I have SyncThing installed and can theoretically use that, I haven't bothered). The ThinkSmart can lock itself in the usual ways.

What's funny is that what you did with a Pi Zero and Plan 9 is basically my ideal when put in conjunction with one of Lenovo's USB ThinkPad keyboards. The TrackPoints on those have three mouse buttons and work well, and the keyboard is sleek enough.

I actually looked at the price of those on Aliexpress but realized I didn’t want to have cables or get more hardware.

This is perfect for my raspberry pi 400.

The keyboard form factor was just missing some kind of unique display and this is perfect to use my old kindle with a broken touchscreen.

What a perfect solution to my niche problem!

Probably a stupid question, but does Kindle have any "native" app support? I'm surprised the it even has a browser. I wonder what are the limitations?

Nope, no app store, no way of installing apps (other than rooting a device).

If you want to do anything other than read, I'd definitely recommend something running Android underneath.

way before the kindle fire you could in fact buy "active content" for kindles on the amazon storefront. I recall buying a crossword app this way. It was fine, especially since this was an original (or 2nd generation?) kindle, which still had a physical keyboard !

At some point they dumped support for this. I recall it as being around the time the Fire came out. There doesn't seem to be a lot of info left out there, e.g. it merits just an un-cited sentence in wikipedia's article on the kind. there may have been some remnants of it as late as 2020 though: https://the-digital-reader.com/amazon-removes-active-content...

Kindle does not have any native app support. But it's a linux machine. If you can jailbreak it (which has become increasingly harder), then you can write/install custom apps on it.

For example, back in the day I had a epub reader app installed.

I was wondering if Amazon, instead of wasting money and time on Fire phones/tablets, had poured a portion of that resource into making native Kindle apps a thing, maybe it could have a more compelling ecosystem by now.

It's unlikely that would have worked. 2 big ecosystems seems to be what the market will bear and choosing an Android base for the fire tablets makes a lot of sense.

Very few people are going to bother writing apps for another ecosystem. Also, more apps means less control by Amazon which won't fly

it runs linux and you can compile a decent amount of stuff for it with an armhf toolchain. just have to jailbreak.

Want:

Mechanical Keyboard with an OS powering a PaperWhite screen.

Remarkable 2 with folio case gets close!

I don’t have the Folio case, but I have a Remarkable 2 and the screen refresh time is not as nice as the Paperwhite by quite a margin. I had actually managed to plug a USB keyboard to the RM2 (can be done, you need to tweak several things and power it) and the experience was quite “meh”. Also on a personal note, I prefer the form factor/size of the Kindle for this. The RM2 always feels flimsy!

That seems strange. You can use the pen on it, and the screen changes near instantly. There is not much of a lag. I would think that typing would be almost as good.

Edit: I see this guy typing here, and the latency doesn't seem horrible. Probably equivalent to the latency of an actual mechanical typewriter. https://youtu.be/R8VG6dQkTwI?si=_YWK7-fLw7MhS1Vv&t=2226

Of course, this folio keyboard looks horrible.

Writing latency on the RM is good: for typing is very likely to be well above OK… as long as you don't have to scroll the text/screen. Because page turning latency/refresh speed is quite bad. No "this is shitty bad, gimme my money back" but slow enough that it makes skimming impossible and normal page turning slightly annoying (worsened the larger the PDF). A similar kind of latency can be seen particularly when using the cut/move tool, for example.

To be fair when typing (a few minutes after the time in the video you shared) the latency for refreshing the screen does not seem that bad. But they keyboard looks annoying to use… I way prefer having a full choice of keyboards (aside from the fun of having written the code of course).

Typing latency on my contraption is pretty similar to what can be seen in the video, maybe slightly slower but not by much. Since two weeks ago I have written several drafts of blog posts (while I added some features that were needed, or fixed some annoyances) and it is usable, although I miss adding a "read mode" (scrolling via cursor is slow, and I have not added `:num`, `gg` or `G` yet which makes reading what you have written not great.

There are a few writing appliances out there trying to do that, but they are all based on proprietary solutions. It _might_ be possible to get a decent e-ink display with a passable refresh rate at non-monopolistic prices and bypass the Rube Goldberg-esque setup by just plugging that into a Pi via SPI, but right now there just aren't many options for that out there.

https://getfreewrite.com/

This has no OS (at least that you can access). I have one, have written a number of drafts with it, and regret both purchasing it and it not being a better machine. The software is really bad and there is no way to tinker with it, no way to write custom software. Indeed, in the last update before it became abandonware, they made updates cryptographically signed to make it more difficult for people to jailbreak it. The hardware is pretty and the keyboard is nice but the battery is really bad. It lasts only a few hours and takes forever to charge. And if the battery is depleted, it takes too long to get to the charge level necessary for using it even while plugged. Please don't buy this.

The screen and battery are too small; you really want a laptop or subnotebook form factor where the screen opens like a book so screen and keyboard can both be large enough to be useful.

A5 format (like a book, slightly less than most laptops) seems a sweet spot, also for keeping it in a larger jacket pocket.

I have one of these sitting next to me right now, and it's essentially unusable due to the dispaly lag, and largely (though not completely) reliant on a service from the vendor for syncing. The hardware is passable, but the software is not, and it seems to be at a very slow drip of maintenance, if not completely abandoned.

Boox Tab Ultra?

https://shop.boox.com/products/tab

Nice, and the price is okay, but the keyboard is not suitable for longer writing sessions.

Even its very own demo video shows a lady on a software with the device AND her laptop (how ironic)!

If anyone has it, how long does the battery last?

I don't have that one, but I have one of the A4 sized onyx tablets. I use it for sheet music, turning pages with an air turn pedal

I get about 3-4 weeks on a charge, albeit with somewhat light use

These are good but lack the OS.

I want Linux and/or ssh

The Boox Tab runs Android.

I don't have one, but I use the Android app Termux on my stock Kindle Fire tablet. It's a rather complete Linux on Android. Not emulation.

CLI environment just works, and I've been able to run GUI apps with some configuration and an additional Android app for X or RDP or VNC. I generally don't use a Bluetooth keyboard or mouse with my setup, and I tend to avoid the GUI stuff.

But for extended shell scripting or writing CLI Python C code all native, all local, no networking needed. And I use it all the time for SSH.

https://termux.dev/en/

I've set up a Kindle that can ssh into my NUC with attached keyboard with a few taps of the screen. Is that close enough?

About five years ago, I did it with a raspberry pi used as a host, with the Kindle connecting to an istance of screen running on the raspberry.

Not exactly what I did, but you get the idea. https://liliputing.com/kindleberry-wireless-using-a-raspberr...

This solution seems easier, and more portable.

I have always eyed similar solutions, but getting root access to the Kindle has been getting more convoluted each time: I always chose to not try to avoid being a few days without reading if I bricked it. This is one of the reasons why I wrote this: should work as long as the Kindle has a decent-ish browser.

I did this, and to my surprise rooting it worked first time. Usually this sort of thing takes up a whole weekend of problem-solving.

Still, I used a second-hand Kindle, not my main one, just in case. You should be able to find one dirt cheap.

Took me awhile to get there, but my ideal mono-tasking "typewriter-like" setup is:

- iPad Air

- iA Writer iPad App[1] (or: Simplenote)

- TwelveSouth Compass Pro, for use in portrait mode[2]

- Standard Apple Bluetooth Keyboard + Apple Pencil clipped on side[3]

Also, I might be old-fashioned, but when I need to type outside -- which is often -- I just bring my laptop! Lenovo X1C (excellent keyboard) with a great matte screen[4]. Since that's Linux, I usually use vim + goyo, Typora, or Simplenote.

[1]: https://apps.apple.com/app/id775737172?platform=ipad

[2]: https://www.twelvesouth.com/cdn/shop/files/CompassPro-sectio...

[3]: https://ibb.co/3kNZmy1

[4]: https://ibb.co/wJLmLwK

Neat project. I'd really like to author plain AsciiDoc on an e-paper display without distractions.

On one of your earlier commits (https://github.com/rberenguel/PiWrite/commit/c23bfdccd43e1c5...), you mentioned using a Pico W. There may be an avenue for that. A few days ago I submitted my Raspberry Pi Pico W Host MQTT Numpad project to Hacker News, but unfortunately it didn't gain any traction. https://gitlab.com/baiyibai/pico-w-usb-host-mqtt-numpad. I detail some of the developments on USB Host mode. There doesn't seem to be native MicroPython support for USB Host mode yet. I did find a project which seems to to load the pico-pio-sdk as a library and use a GamePad for input: https://github.com/danjperron/pico4legsBot

Also, about a year, I wrote down some of the requirements for an e-paper RPI Pico-based e-ink writer in a comment. I wanted to dub mine, 'the microWrite', 'μWrite', 'uWrite', or 'you write' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32092930.

I suppose the question is whether it is feasible to adapt PiWrite to run in MicroPython. The next question is whether one could ditch the webserver-based approach and interface an e-paper screen directly to the RP2040. Waveshare offers MicroPython libraries for their e-paper displays. This might offer better latency.

Super, this has inspired me to look more into using a keyboard to write on a Kindle on an external server, and now I have a much better writing set up.

I've found I enjoy writing on Kindle, despite how limited it was. I make notes by highlighting words in a book and writing them down in a note that was associated with the highlighted word. Clunky but it works.

Using an external server is much better though as it works with my keyboard, allows to keep the writing elsewhere. Very happy with it.

Similar project for Pocketbook readers: https://github.com/borzunov/remoteink

"Have you ever wanted to use your Kindle Paperwhite to write, even more, with a vim-like editor?"

No, but I had really hoped for something beyond glorified paper.

"The TL;DR is a webserver running somewhere a keyboard can be plugged, and a page opened in the Kindle's web browser."

I’m sure the input latency on that setup is just a joy to use

It’s not as bad as I expected before trying the project. You can try with SolarWriter (which is easier to set up than this weird thing I did) to get an idea. I consider it “mechanical typewriter” level. For me, good enough.

I wonder whether USB Network might be an option to reduce the latency a little. L

Plus then keeps the Pi WiFi free for regular use rather than as a private AP network.

The Kindle can’t handle USB networking, so it wouldn’t be a viable option. The private network is only needed if you are not in a WiFi capable area: at home I use it without AP

Historically, at least, USB networking was pretty straightforward to enable on a jailbroken Kindle.

This is very neat, but the latency from typing to screen in the demo looked horrible.

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