Crypto Clock — the beautiful crypto currency ticker that runs on an old Kindle
I had a special birthday coming up and I wanted to make a cool gift to mark the occasion. As the recipient is interested in crypto currencies & blockchain tech, I thought a desk/shelf crypto price ticker would be a cool present. I found a couple of products online but they were either not very good or prohibitively expensive so I decided to have a go at building one myself.
I thought it would b e cool if the device looked like a retro departures board, periodically cycling through various crypto prices. I wanted it to have low power consumption, always showing the latest prices, configurable & attractive.
At first I looked at split flap displays but it turns out they’re hard to come by & expensive. I decided to go for an eink display which I figured I could make to look like a split flap display. I’d heard about rooting Kindles and using them in DIY projects so I decided to go down that route, I managed to pick up a Kindle Paperwhite 2 on eBay for the bargain price of £18. Rooting the Kindle was easy enough; details on how to do that are out of the scope of this write up but I’m sure you’ll find all the information you need over on the ‘mobile read’ forum. I then got a Linux desktop running on the Kindle, ready to run my app.
Using my language of choice (Dart) I decided to make a web app that would run in a kiosk mode browser. I went for the Midori browser as it has way less overhead than Chromium or Firefox. I designed the UI to look like a 7x3 split flap display. I added a simple character by character transition as the display updates which flows across it just like the old departure boards. Also by setting each character black for a second as it transitions does a lovely job of resetting the eink to avoid any ghosting. For the data source I used the Binance API which was super easy to use. As the Kindle had a touch screen I made it so tapping the left or right side of the screen would cycle between the crypto symbol pairs. I also added a configuration screen which you can access by hitting the central column on the display. The configuration screen allows you to choose which symbol pairs to cycle through and the duration to rest on each. With it being an eink display, having a long time between updates results in much less power consumption. I decided on 60 seconds as the default update time.
