How about a Kindle e-reader repurposed to serve as a full-fledged monitor? No matter how outrageous the idea might seem, someone has actually attempted the same and has also been successful in that. It all started with Adhityaa Chandrasekar who suffered a breakdown of his laptop display. As Tom’sHardware stated, he chose to mitigate the scenario by converting his Kindle Paperwhite 3 into a monitor instead. As it is with Kindle devices, you have a glare-free monochrome display to look at which is very safe for your eyes.

However, a frame rate of just 3 or 4 is pretty much ordinary, something that Chandrasekar believes can be enhanced to 10 or so. This can be considered quite decent when it comes to e-paper displays. Needless to say, undertaking such an endeavor involves jailbreaking the Kindle for which there already are several methods already available. You can refer to sites like mobileread.com for a step-by-step guide to jailbreak the Kindle. Chandrasekar said what is important is that you have access to the root shell before attempting to convert it into a monitor.

Next, Chandrasekar said he used codes written in Go language which serves to continuously display the screenshots that are being sent from the connected computer. Unfortunately, the code which number no more than 30 lines has been lost but is easy to write. The screenshots also needed to be converted to a format that would be easy for the Kindle to deal with. Such screenshots are transferred to the Kindle via usbnet using Netcat. As already stated, this method allows for a frame rate of 3-4 which he said can be enhanced easily to around 10, which is pretty much the standard with e-paper displays.

All of the details have been shared on GitHub which you can refer to if you have a spare Kindle device at hand and are eager to attempt something similar.