Old Kindle as an e-ink homelab dashboard

A while ago I saw some posts in r/homeassistant about e-ink displays used as dashboards and wanted to try the same but for my homelab. So I bought a waveshare e-ink panel and bricked it pretty quickly and didn't want to order another one. But I still had an old Kindle lying around which I hadn't used in years, so I tried it again with that one and this time it worked. It shows me if something is down (Uptime Kuma), how full my media pool is, the Proxmox uptime and the weather. During the day it swaps between the dashboard and a random photo from an Immich album every 5 minutes and between 22:00 and 07:00 it only shows photos, because I don't need monitoring at night. The Kindle itself doesn't render anything. A service on my server collects the data, draws a 600x800 grayscale PNG and serves it at /dash.png and the Kindle just runs a loop which downloads that image every 5 minutes and puts it on the screen. So it is really only used as a display. The jailbreaking took the longest by far but in the end I am very happy with the result. How to do it on your own: Jailbreak the Kindle . Run your serial and firmware through the wizard first and it tells you which method to use. Mine was WinterBreak . This video walks the whole sequence and worked for me. Install the KindleModding Hotfix . This is what makes any .sh file in /mnt/us/documents/ show up in the library as a tappable entry, so you can start things by tapping what the Kindle thinks is a book. Install MRPI and KUAL , both from that thread. Block OTA updates with renameotabin . An update is the one thing that can still take the jailbreak away. Set up SSH with USBNetwork (there's a good writeup here ), before anything else. Starting the display loop stops the reader UI and takes the touchscreen with it, so SSH is your way back in. Run the render service on your server so it serves a finished PNG. Put the fetch loop script on the Kindle and start it. Wrote a more detailed guide about the setup on my personal site ( mxd.codes/articles/an-e-ink-homelab-dashboard-on-a-jailbroken-kindle ). You could also show something completely different on it, like Home Assistant data or a reminder which bin has to go out this week. All you need is an image.