Sunday, April 21, 2019

Kindle Art Projection

This project uses a camera to project an image across multiple Kindle displays. You can move each Kindle to show different parts of a larger image.


Any image can be used, but this particular setup displays sections of  "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte"- the painting's texture shows very well on the e-ink display.


Every few seconds, a controller (consisting of a raspberry pi zero and a camera) instructs a Kindle to black out the display, then illuminate each of its four corners. The controller records these five images and subtracts the black base image from the corner image to get a difference:

Result of "corner - base" image

Output to the Kindle

Points on the screen recognized by the controller and camera


I recently found out that the going price for a working used Kindle Touch is about $20, and that they are remarkably easy to jailbreak. Using a controller with SSH permissions, you can update the Kindle display to show any image through the eips command.

The controller resides in this 3D printed case

Here is a video of the art display in motion:



Code is on GitHub: https://github.com/dylanrush/perspectives
I was inspired by a few artistic Kindle hacks:

"This homemade literary quote clock is the best way to recycle an old Kindle"
"Animated Picture Frame Needs Charging Once Per Month"