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Kindle as a High-Contrast GPS

Kindle as a High-Contrast GPS

13 comments

·April 2, 2025
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8-prime

Although not the most elegant solution I like the idea of it, both from a batterylife standpoint, as well as a legibility perspective.

Building a custom solution with some microcontroller a gps module and a small E-Ink display sounds doable and like a fun project.

carlosjobim

For a small display, you might be interested in the Beeline products: https://beeline.co

I'm myself considering one of these.

diggan

I'm looking at https://beeline.co/pages/beeline-cycling for example, but it isn't clear what display they're using, it looks like regular LCD, not even anti-glare? What's nice with e-Ink, is that it's highly visible even in strong sunlight (extra so when they've focused on anti-glare), while LCD even with anti-glare can be difficult to see.

carlosjobim

While not e-Ink, I had the impression that the Beeline has more outdoors-suitable displays. From the Beeline Moto 2 specs:

"Technology: Ultra bright IPS TFT with anti-reflective and hydrophobic coating"

But e-Ink would be superior for outdoors readability. I was looking for a motorcycle navigator when I found the OP article.

myself248

I've been looking for an e-ink maps/GPS device for years. I feel like turn-by-turn would be a waste of the e-ink, but more like, topo maps that I can use with a compass, and just power the device on for a moment whenever I want a new map tile.

But none of the e-ink devices I've found have an internal GPS chip, and I haven't dug deep enough to find if any have an internal UART or i2c pins to which I could attach one. (Nor do I have any clue how to make the OS see it after I do that.)

It looks like this is just using BlueNMEA to inhale GPS sentences from an external device, which is.... something, I guess.

tiagod

>I haven't dug deep enough to find if any have an internal UART or i2c pins to which I could attach one.

There's some info for Kobo devices here: https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kobo_GPIO_Extensions

myself248

Whoah, and a few links later: https://www.dotmana.com/weblog/2014/05/kobo-mini-gps-mod/

Awesome, I have a few Boox devices here but no Kobos. Guess that's about to change...

giraffe_lady

My rec sailing team uses an e-ink chart plotter. I like it more than anything else I've used for that purpose, it really is a great fit. Unfortunately they're like $800 and I have no idea if it could be adapted to a general purpose gps. I have long suspected it just runs android but never really looked into it and don't know how much that would help anyway. https://www.maptattoo.com

mnx

Simple and clever. One concern I have is in my experience the kindle displays are quite fragile, I would worried it would break mounted like that.

carlosjobim

From the article, it seems the project is based on a more advanced setup by David Schneider: https://spectrum.ieee.org/build-a-readable-bicycle-computer

Aldipower

Such a rainy day! SCNR

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