A new trend is gaining popularity on the social network Threads: Ukrainian users are giving a second wind to their old, abandoned e-books. Instead of gathering dust on shelves, old devices with e-ink screens are turning into personal dashboards with weather, power outage schedules, currency rates, and useful widgets.
A new trend is gaining popularity on the social network Threads: Ukrainian users are giving a second wind to their old, abandoned e-books. Instead of gathering dust on shelves, old devices with e-ink screens are turning into personal dashboards with weather, power outage schedules, currency rates, and useful widgets.
Threads user poezdaty.blog decided to turn his old, over 10-year-old, "slow" Android 4.x-based e-reader, which was already lying around at home, into useless junk.
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As you can see from the photo, the old BOOX device now boasts a full-fledged information hub: the current weather in Wrocław (with temperature and sky conditions), a calendar for November 2026, a detailed forecast for the week, currency rates (PLN and EUR), and even air quality indicators (PM2.5).
How it works technically:
on a third-party server, once an hour, a special Python script generates a PNG image that matches the exact parameters of the reader's screen and sends it via the web;
the book itself "wakes up" every hour using the Tasker application, activates Wi-Fi, downloads the finished image via wget to the desired folder, turns off the network and goes into sleep mode;
The first author's idea inspired another user, happaro, who also decided to adapt his old Kindle, created using instructions from the artificial intelligence Claude.
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The photo shows that this is a detailed dashboard of a real day. The screen displays a large clock with the date, calendar events, air alarm status, and most importantly, a personalized tracker of power outage queues with a visual scale. The device also displays limits and resource usage (for example, indicators of cloud services Claude and Codex).
How it works:
after jailbreaking (WinterBreak firmware for Kindle 8 from kindlemodding.org), the user installed a special KUAL menu for running custom scripts;
Both authors note that projects like these are a great way to give a second life to electronics that would otherwise be thrown away or gather dust for years. The use of E-Ink screens makes such homemade "smart watch panels" extremely energy-efficient, stylish, and useful.
