Home-Assisstant Interface That Runs in the Kindle Browser

What? Switch on and off devices, lights, or music in your house from a wall-mounted e-paper display.

Why? I had a kindle laying around. However, even new kindles run a 2009ish chromeium browser that does not support modern javascript, also not the home-assistant UI.

How To

1. create a long-lived access token to your home-assistant in your account profile. This token will be saved locally on your kindle and used to log into home-assistant.

2. create a group of entities you want to display on the kindle. Currently supported are sensors, switches, lights, scenes, and media players.

# Example configuration.yaml entry
group:
  on_kindle:
    name: Kindle Entities
    entities:
      - switch.kitchen_pin_3
      - sensor.bedroom_temp
      - sensor.porch_temp

3. clone the repository to a local computer that you can connect via USB to your kindle. Make sure that you have node.js installed.

4. Within the cloned repository on your machine, create a configuration file src/config.json for your kindle interface based on the example config.

// example config.json
{
  "token": "askjhdfkshdkf", // your long lived access token
  "wifi": "",  // see below
  "address": "http://hassio.local:8123",  // address of your home-assisstant WITHOUT trailing slash /
  "groupname": "on_kindle",  // the group configured above, you may choose any name
  "media_sources": {
    "media_player.your_media_player": ["Source 1", "Source 3"]  // optional, if you want to show only specific source options
  }
}

5. build the index.html file by running the following commands on your machine. This will create a single file index.html that needs to be copied to the kindle.

npm ci
npm run build

6. Copy the file to your kindle. Your kindle has to be connected via USB.

# example on Mac
cp dist/index.html /Volumes/Kindle/documents/index.html

7. Detach the kindle from USB and open the 'Beta-Browser'. Make sure that javascript and images are enabled. Navigate to file:///mnt/us/documents/index.html. Done. The screen reloads every 10s and will update automatically when new entities are added to the specified group on home-assistant.

8. Disable the kindle's screensaver such that the display stays on. For this, you need to go to the home screen and type ~ds into the search bar. More info here.

Supported Devices

Confirmed support was reported for:

• Kindle Paperwhite 1 & 3

Additional Options

WiFi

You can display a qr code to let people connect to your wifi. For this, create a qr code and convert it into a base64 string (click 'copy image'). Then, add the string to the config:

// src/config.json
{
  ...
  "wifi": "data:image/png;base64,...",
  ...
}

Media Player Sources

If you don't want to display all sources of a media player entity, only put those that you want into the config:

// src/config.json
{
  ...
  "media_sources": {
    "media_player.your_media_player": ["Source 1", "Source 3"]  // optional, if you want to show only specific source options
  }
  ...
}