Having a go at using my kindle as a clock/weather dashboard
This sort of thing: http://www.mpetroff.net/archives/2012/09/14/kindle-weather-display/
Key think is that I will be publishing images of the time + weather, Kindle will be a convenient display but of course you could use any web-enabled device that'll show an image.
Thinking of using a Pi as the web server but that's just arbritrary too as it'll probably be a pure python web server and implementation.
These instructions are for my Kindle Wifi with 4.0x software. Your mileage may (will) vary.
To have a full-time clock, you need to disable the screensaver. To do this:
- Go to the Home screen
- Open up the keyboard
- Type in (all commands without inverted commas): ";debugOn"
- Press enter
- Type in: "~disableScreensaver"
- Press enter
- Type in: ";debugOff"
- Press enter
If you want to revert this change, do the above but type in ";resumeScreensaver" at step 5 instead.
That's it, now you can use the Experimental browser, pointing it at the clock web page and you're done.
Oh, and if you're feeling game, check out "~help" ;)
The "server" is just a bit of Python.
There are two different types of data that I want to display, low- and high-refresh.
- Low-refresh:
- Today's weather forecast
- Current temperature
- Number of emails in inbox
- Agenda
- High-refresh:
- Time/date
The idea would be to statically generate the low-refresh data on page load. This could be done once per hour via JS/Meta refresh.
The high-refresh data would be done via JS.
The positives of this breakdown are simplicity. A single template with a single block of back-end Python. No need for ajax end-points for async updates etc. JS can still handle the time of course.
The negatives are that I cannot add high-refresh data without having to change the design a fair bit, adding ajax endpoints in my Python. Will deal with that if I have the need.