Kindle 4 Non-Touch Dashboard
Turning an old, power-button-broken Kindle 4 (non-touch) into a scriptable, always-on e-ink display.
- Add-on
- Alpha
- Medium brick risk
This project hasn't been claimed by its maintainer yet, so its details come from the community. Is it yours? Claim it
Before you start
- How hard is it?
- HardUses the command line or developer tools.
- What you need
- Comfort with the command line
- A computer
- Another hack installed first
- Can it break my device?
- Small chance of trouble, with a way to recover.
- Can I undo it?
- The project doesn't say. Assume you can't.
Did it work for you?
Did Kindle 4 Non-Touch Dashboard work on your Amazon Kindle 4?
No reports yet.
One-tap reports from owners. Bricked reports are checked before they count.
Compatibility
Devices: Amazon Kindle 4.
No compatibility information yet.
Getting started
From the project's README ("What's installed"):
- Jailbreak — kindle-k4-jailbreak-1.8.N (MobileRead thread t=191158). Installed via the diagnostics-mode method (data.tar.gz + ENABLEDIAGS dropped at USB root, then Settings → Restart).
- USBNetwork — kindle-usbnetwork-0.57.N-k4 (MobileRead thread t=88004). Gives SSH (dropbear) access. Installed the standard way: drop Updateusbnetwork0.57.Nk4install.bin at the USB root, then Settings → Menu → Update Your Kindle.
- Custom dashboard script + cron job (this repo — see below).
- screensaver-off init.d hook (this repo) — persistent watchdog that keeps the stock reader UI stopped and the screen awake for the entire uptime of the device (not just at boot — see below for why).
We deliberately skipped KUAL / MKK / MRPI — not needed once you have SSH; everything past the jailbreak was done from a root shell.
Auto-boot into SSH mode: a blank file named auto in /mnt/us/usbnet/ (i.e. E:\usbnet\auto when mounted as a drive) makes the device boot straight into WiFi/SSH mode instead of the default USB mass-storage mode. Without this file, the device boots into plain mass-storage mode after every reboot/power-cycle, with no sshd running — confirmed by testing: after a reboot, the dashboard cron job kept working fine (it's independent of networking), but SSH access was gone until this file was added. If you ever need to get back to mass-storage mode to edit config files, just delete this auto file (or use the on-device …
Risk and recovery
- Brick risk
- Medium
- Requires opening the device
- No
From the project's README ("Controlling a device that is suspended most of the time"):
With interval=1800 grace=90 the device is reachable roughly 5% of the time. A single ssh will nearly always time out; that is expected, not a failure.
The poller is the control channel. It retries until it lands inside a wake window, then does everything in one shot:
$fix = '/mnt/us/usbnet/bin/tmux kill-session -t burn; echo ondemand > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scalinggovernor; /etc/init.d/framework start; /etc/init.d/webreaderd start; /etc/init.d/browserd start; echo RESTOREDOK' for ($i=1; $i -le 400; $i++) { $r = ssh -o ConnectTimeout=5 root@192.168.50.75 $fix if ($r -match 'RESTOREDOK') { "caught on attempt $i"; break } }
This works -- it caught a running loop on attempt 13. Killing the tmux session first is the part that matters: it stops the script before its next echo mem, rather than setting a flag that only the following wake would read.
Do not try to recover via USB drive mode while a suspend loop is running. Two things break at once: the loop suspends the device mid-transfer, so the drive appears and then vanishes (Windows reports "please insert a drive" and unmounts it), and framework/volumd -- which drive the mass-storage handoff -- are exactly what the teardown stopped. Confirmed the hard way, three times over. USB drive mode only works again once the reader UI has been restored.
Also useful:
- Press the 5-way center button to resume the device on demand, which starts a fresh grace window immediately. You still need the poller to use it. …