Kindle Weather

STOP, THIS WILL BRICK YOUR KINDLE, ONLY FOR LINUX GEEK.

UNLESS YOU KNOW ALL THE FOLLOWING LINUX COMMANDS, GO AWAY, THIS IS NOT FOR YOU.

Big Thanks to Matthew Petroff for his sharing.

This project is fully based on the project shared by Matthew Petroff: http://mpetroff.net/2012/09/kindle-weather-display/

Without his kind share of this great work, my kindle 3 might still sleep in the dust.

The changes I made:

• Use crontab instead of kite or stop powerd by changing the suspend_levels.

• Reorganized the weather_script.py by spliting weather API out.

• Change weather-script-preprocess.svg to fit the weather API.

• Warn user when low battery(less than 10%)

• I tried to change weather-script-preprocess.svg to use <image> tag for external image which allow me to easily change the icon, but I failed to at the rsvg-convert point. So still in embedded way.

License

• The code is in MIT license.
• The weather_script.py file is based on the work of Matthew Petroff 2012, MIT license.
• The weather-script-preprocess.svg and its embedded icon are under CC0 Public Domain Dedication license by Matthew Petroff also. I(Gris Ge) did small change to fit the weather.com API.

Pre-requirements

• Kindle 3 wireless (Only tested on this one).
• The API key from weather.com
• Kindle Jailbreak and USB network.
• A kindle WIFI accessible Linux server with python2 pngcrush librsvg2-tools.

HowTo

Kindle Side

Jailbreak your Kindle and install USB network.

• The above wiki pages works on me. The tips would be disable wifi at the initial login, then change root password, change ssh config to allow wifi login, set as auto start, reboot.

Allow cron running in suspend mode.

Skip this if you have USB cable always connected to your kindle.

• Execute mntroot rw
• Execute sed -i -e 's/1216/1152/' /etc/kdb.src/luigi/system/daemon/powerd/suspend_levels
• The 1152 here means the 7th bit(start from 0) as 0 which allows crontab in suspend mode. This is purely based on my guess, but it works. :)

Install weather display script

• Edit the URL in display-weather.sh by pointing to your own http server.
• Create folder mkdir /mnt/base-us/weather.
• Make sure kindle root mount point is writeable mntroot rw
• scp display-weather.sh root@k3w:/usr/bin/
• Make sure display-weather.sh is executable via chmod +x on kindle.

Setup crontab

• Execute mntroot rw.

• Add this line into /etc/crontab/root

*/60 6-22 * * * /usr/bin/display-weather.sh ```

• This means weather report will be refreshed hourly during 6AM to 10PM.

Reboot your kindle via reboot command.

Server Side

Install httpd daemon.

• sudo yum install httpd pngcrush librsvg2-tools python2 -y
• sudo systemctl enable httpd
• sudo systemctl start httpd

Create weather output folder with correct permission.

• sudo mkdir /var/www/html/weather
• sudo chmod 777 /var/www/html/weather/ or use chown.

Setup crontab

• Add this line to crontab -e to refresh weather every 29 minutes during 6AM to 10PM:

*/29 6-22 * * * <PATH>/weather_script.py <API_KEY> <LAT> <LON>

• Change <PATH> as the folder of source code.
• Change <API_KEY> as the weather.com API key strin.
• Change <LAT> and <LON> as latitude and lontitude of your city.

Create initial weather PNG

• Invoke <PATH>/weather_script.py <API_KEY> <LAT> <LON>.
• Check whether you can get the weather png via: http://<your_server_hostname>/weather/weather.png

TODO

• Include AQI(air quality index)

Contact

• https://github.com/cathay4t/kindle-weather/issues