fixing

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Celebrating/talking about repairing stuff, the right to repair stuff, and the intersection of tech and solarpunk ideals.

What does it mean to use what we have, including technology, to try to build a better, more environmentally just world?

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Turning an old Amazon Kindle into a eink development platform (blog.lidskialf.net)

submitted 2 weeks ago by poVoq@slrpnk.net to c/fixing@slrpnk.net

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[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 8 points 2 weeks ago

So, off to ebay I went! I saw a number of really cheap ones marked “BLOCKED BY AMAZON”; I decided not to go for these since theoretically they might have been stolen. In the end, I went for £7 Kindle 4 “non-touch”.

A few days later, it turned up. And I discovered why it might have been so cheap: its stuck in some sort of unquittable demo mode:

This makes me wonder the unit might have been stolen from a retail demo display.

Still, the content of the article is wonderful. I really like the author's marriage of both the hardware and software aspects. I had no idea that an RS-232 interface was exposed off 3 soldier pads inside the unit. That certainly makes it a great place to start, but as the author shows a lot more knowledge (that the author had) was necessary.

A really interesting read!

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Very cool! That's a very old Kindle model, though, and I'd be very surprised if any of the methods used are still available on newer models - U-Boot, cracked root password, even a login prompt.