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Jailbroken Kindle showing an AI usage chart
Jailbroken Kindle showing an AI usage chartCredit: @kuberwastaken on X

Turn an old Kindle into an e-ink AI usage dashboard

Gadget, Medium

A jailbroken 10-year-old Kindle shows month-to-date AI spend across Codex, Claude Code, Cursor and other tools. It wakes every six hours, refreshes over Wi-Fi and sleeps again, while the e-ink keeps showing the last frame.

View build on GitHub ↗Share on X

Kuber wanted a desk display of AI usage, like Theo's, without buying another e-ink screen. kindle-ai-usage runs a small Node server that collects usage from Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode, Gemini CLI and other agents that ccusage supports, plus importers for Cursor, the Claude API, GitHub Copilot and Gemini. It reports API-equivalent list price, which is different from what your subscription costs.

The Kindle side uses FBInk to draw on the screen, RTC alarms to wake on fixed six-hour slots, Wi-Fi only during a refresh, and suspend-to-RAM in between. A failed fetch leaves the last good frame on screen.

The repo includes an agent skill. It asks for your exact Kindle model and firmware, checks the live KindleModding jailbreak wizard before touching the device, helps pick a host (laptop, always-on LAN box or tailnet), and walks through connecting each account. The original build used a KT3, and other models may need a different jailbreak route.

How your agent drives it

Copied from the Kuberwastaken/kindle-ai-usage README

  1. Paste into your agent
    Use $kindle-ai-usage to verify my Kindle, choose where to host the dashboard,
and connect all of my AI usage accounts.
  2. Shell
    $ npm run kindle:package

Any coding agent that can run a shell can run these. Read the README before you run anything on a robot that moves.

Ideas to try with it

Our ideas, not the builder's claims.

  1. Show your agent's open tasks on the lock screen
  2. Put a second Kindle by the door with the day's calendar
  3. Change the refresh to once a day if you only check it in the morning
Source
Kuberwastaken/kindle-ai-usage on GitHub
Last commit
2026-10-31
Builder
@kuberwastaken
Repo
Kuberwastaken/kindle-ai-usage, 14 stars
Built with
Kindle (jailbroken), Node.js

Links

Guides: Codex and ChatGPT hardware projects people actually built

What to build next

Builds that share a board, robot or agent with this one.