Rust (and Slint) on a Jailbroken Kindle

205 points30 comments19 hours ago
sandreas

This is cool, thanks for sharing. I recently compiled Rust / Slint on a LicheeRV Nano, which is RISC-V 64bit musl[1]. It's a little portable audio player I'm working on, the compile process is done via custom Cross docker image.

Currently I'm evaluating Battery Pal[2], because the TP4057 Module was not stable enough to power USB-C to 3.5mm Adapters reliably. So far it seems to work as expected.

1: https://github.com/nanowave-player/nanowave-ui

2: https://pnlabs.ca/batterypal/

FlyingSnake

Great article. Hacking old kindles is fun! I encourage everyone to give it a try. The retro feel of eink makes it special for me.

I wrote about my experience in cross compiling zig on an old kindle some time ago.

https://samkhawase.com/blog/zig-kindle-gdb/

ilvez

Would be so nice to use those previous Paperwhites for something like this as well. Instead I just lose them while travelling. Just lost my last 2019/smth edition. 3rd one with such fate..

_hzw

I am working on a self-hosted library server for jailbroken kindle and opted for using pure Rust for the KUAL app to sync books and annotations with the server.

It's just running `cargo build --release --target armv7-unknown-linux-musleabihf` with a .cargo/config.toml:

``` [target.armv7-unknown-linux-musleabihf] linker = "rust-lld" rustflags = ["-C", "link-self-contained=yes"]. ```

the downside is I can't use any c-deps. :)

hardwaresofton

This is awesome! How reliable are kindle jailbreaks/avoiding updates, etc?

Have opted for other devices like the xteink (or a boox in the future) due to what seemed like a relatively small ecosystem around “aftermarket” kindle modifications.

The kindle would be a great option if it could be reliably jailbroken and loaded with custom software

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DoctorOW

This looks cool, and one of the first posts I've seen on HN in a few months where I genuinely wanted to try it.

voidUpdate

Is there a list somewhere of jailbreak-able kindles? I've been thinking of getting one to toy with for a while, but I don't want to accidentally get one that is more heavily locked down, or that we cant run our own code on for some reason

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KolmogorovComp

Tangential, how does slint fare compared to Druid/egui(?)

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ElenaDaibunny

zig as a cross-compile backend for rust is so good.

IshKebab

Good work! I guess you need to leave it plugged in?