Kindle Dashboard

A Home Assistant custom integration that serves a clean, e-ink–optimised dashboard for jailbroken Kindles, with a full configuration UI accessible from the HA sidebar. Supports multiple independent dashboards, each with its own URL, layout, and settings.

Features

Multiple dashboards — add as many dashboards as you like, each independently configured
Kindle-optimised view — high-contrast, large touch targets for controls, compact layout for read-only sensors
Four themes — Sharp (default), Soft, Ink, and Minimal
Flexible sections — add, remove, and reorder sections; each section is one of:
- Sensors — compact read-only tiles, configurable label and unit; auto-layout up to 4 columns
- Toggles — large-tap-target rows for lights, switches, fans, covers, locks, etc.
- Scenes — tappable scene buttons
- Toggles and Scenes support an optional 2-column layout; all section types support hiding entity IDs
Font picker — choose from Georgia, Courier New, Times New Roman, Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Palatino, or Bookman
Per-tier text styling — independent bold, italic, underline, and size controls for labels, ID/unit text, and sensor values
Inline or stacked units — show sensor units on the same line as the value (22 °F) or on the line below
Light status strip — dots + count summary of all lights; individual lights can be excluded per-section
Battery and time bar — shows Kindle battery level and current time at the top of the page (requires shortcut browser setup below)
Kindle battery as HA sensor — each Kindle pushes its battery level to a dedicated HA sensor entity; visible in the panel top bar
Active device count — the panel shows how many Kindles are currently viewing each dashboard
Configurable auto-refresh interval — set how often entity states are pulled (default 60 seconds)
Force Refresh — reload the Kindle page remotely from the HA panel top bar, within 5 seconds
Hard Refresh mode — make the on-screen ↺ button do a full page reload instead of just pulling new values
Config backup — export and import dashboard configuration as JSON
Token auth — long-lived access token embedded in the bookmark URL; no session cookie needed

Screenshot

Sharp theme · Georgia font · Sensors, Toggles (single and 2-column), running on a Kindle Paperwhite 10th Generation

Installation via HACS

In HACS → ⋮ → Custom Repositories → paste https://github.com/TridTech/HA-KindleDashboard → category: Integration
Click Add, search for Kindle Dashboard, and install
Restart Home Assistant

Manual Installation

Copy custom_components/kindle_dashboard/ into your HA config's custom_components/ folder and restart.

Setup

Settings → Devices & Services → Add Integration → search Kindle Dashboard
Enter a Dashboard Name (e.g. Main) and optional Location Name (e.g. Home)
Kindle Dashboard appears in the HA sidebar
Repeat to add additional dashboards — each gets its own unique URL

Configuring the Dashboard

Open Kindle Dashboard in the sidebar. Use the dashboard picker in the top bar to switch between dashboards. The top bar also shows:

📱 N devices — how many Kindles are currently viewing this dashboard (updates every 10 seconds)
🔋 N% — battery level of connected Kindles (requires battery setup below); shows lowest/highest when multiple devices are active
↺ Force Refresh — immediately reloads the Kindle page
Preview ↗ — opens the Kindle page in a new tab

The config panel has five cards:

Kindle URL

Paste a Long-Lived Access Token (from your HA profile → Long-Lived Access Tokens). Then add a device entry for each Kindle you want to use with this dashboard.

Devices table — each row has:

Device name — a short identifier for this Kindle (e.g. bedroom-kindle). Used for per-device battery tracking and shown in the footer of the Kindle page. No spaces; use hyphens or underscores.
Prevent sleep — when checked (default), the generated config snippet includes the screensaver prevention commands. Uncheck for Kindles you want to sleep normally between uses.
URL — the full bookmark URL for this device, with the device name included. Clipped for display — use the copy buttons to get the full value.
⎘ URL — copies just the bookmark URL to the clipboard
⎘ Config — copies the complete shortcut_browser.sh config block for this device (see below), ready to paste. The sleep prevention commands are included or omitted based on the Prevent sleep toggle.
✕ — removes the device

Click + Add Device to add a new row. The URL and config snippet update live as you type the device name.

If you only have one Kindle and don't need per-device battery tracking, you can leave the device name blank. All devices without a name share the same sensor.<location>_battery entity.

Configuration Backup

Export your dashboard configuration to a JSON file, or import a previously saved one. Importing loads the config into the editor — review it and hit Save to apply.

General

Dashboard Name — shown in the dashboard picker and the HA integrations list
Location Name — displayed in the info bar on the Kindle page
Theme — Sharp, Soft, Ink, or Minimal
Font — body font for the Kindle page
Auto-Refresh Interval — how often entity states are pulled (10–3600 seconds, default 60)
Hard Refresh — when enabled, the ↺ button on the Kindle reloads the entire page (re-fetches HTML, config, and assets) instead of only updating entity states. Use when changes are not appearing after a config save.
Show clock in top bar — displays the current time in the black bar at the very top of the Kindle page
Show battery in top bar — displays the Kindle battery percentage in the top bar (requires shortcut browser HTTP server setup — see below)

Page Dimensions & Text Styling

Page Dimensions (left column):

Width / Height — set to match your Kindle's screen resolution
Scale — multiplies all content proportionally; use above 1.0 for high-DPI screens

Example — Kindle Paperwhite 10th Generation:

Setting	Value
Page Width	536 px
Page Height	722 px
Scale	1.0×

Text Styling (right column):

Label / ID+Unit / Value — independent font size (px) with Bold, Italic, and Underline toggles for each tier

Sections

Each section card shows its type, a name field, and its items. Use ↑ ↓ to reorder, 🗑 to remove.

To add a section: pick a type from the dropdown at the bottom and click + Add Section.

Section types and options:

Type	Per-section options	Item fields
Sensors	Inline Units, Hide IDs	Entity, Label, Unit
Toggles	2 Columns, Hide IDs	Icon, Entity, Label, Hide from status
Scenes	2 Columns, Hide IDs	Icon, Entity, Name

Sensors automatically lay out in up to 4 columns. 2 Columns arranges Toggles or Scenes in a two-column grid. Hide IDs suppresses the entity ID shown below each label. Inline Units shows sensor units on the same line as the value.

Click Save (floating button, bottom-right) when done. Use ↺ Force Refresh in the top bar to push changes to the Kindle immediately.

On Your Kindle (must be jailbroken)

Install kindle-shortcut-browser
In the Kindle URL card in the panel, add a device for each Kindle and click ⎘ Config to copy the ready-to-paste config block for that device. It contains everything below in one step.

Alternatively, configure shortcut_browser.sh manually:

## CONFIG HERE
GO_FULLSCREEN=true
FULLSCREEN_SITE="http://<your-ha-ip>:8123/api/kindle_dashboard/kindle/<entry_id>?token=YOUR_TOKEN&device=bedroom-kindle"
EXTRACHROMEARGS="--kiosk"
USERAGENT="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux armv7l like Android; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.2+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/533.2+ Kindle/3.0+"
BROWSERSCALING=1
## END CONFIG

The device= parameter sets the device name shown in the Kindle page footer and is used for per-device battery tracking in HA. Set it to a short identifier with no spaces (e.g. bedroom-kindle). If multiple Kindles share a dashboard, each must have a unique device name to get its own battery sensor (sensor.home_battery_bedroom_kindle). If omitted, all Kindles write to the same sensor.home_battery entity.

Add the following to shortcut_browser.sh to enable the battery display, battery sensor reporting, and prevent sleep:

## Kindle Dashboard — battery, sleep prevention, and HTTP server ##
BAT_FILE="/mnt/us/kbbat"

# ── Battery ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
BAT=$(lipc-get-prop com.lab126.powerd battLevel 2>/dev/null | tr -d '[] ')
[ -z "$BAT" ] && BAT=$(cat /sys/class/power_supply/*/capacity 2>/dev/null | head -1)
[ -z "$BAT" ] && BAT="?"
printf '%s' "$BAT" > "$BAT_FILE"

( while true; do
    B=$(lipc-get-prop com.lab126.powerd battLevel 2>/dev/null | tr -d '[] ')
    [ -z "$B" ] && B=$(cat /sys/class/power_supply/*/capacity 2>/dev/null | head -1)
    [ -z "$B" ] && B="?"
    printf '%s' "$B" > "$BAT_FILE"
    sleep 30
  done ) &
BAT_PID=$!

# ── Prevent sleep while dashboard is running ─────────────────────────────
# preventScreenSaver alone is not sufficient on firmware 5.16.x+;
# disabling the blanket screensaver framework is also required.
lipc-set-prop -i com.lab126.powerd preventScreenSaver 1
lipc-set-prop -i com.lab126.blanket disable 1
( while true; do
    lipc-set-prop -i com.lab126.powerd preventScreenSaver 1
    lipc-set-prop -i com.lab126.blanket disable 1
    sleep 60
  done ) &
SLEEP_PID=$!

# ── Cleanup on exit: restore sleep and kill background jobs ──────────────
trap 'lipc-set-prop -i com.lab126.powerd preventScreenSaver 0; \
      lipc-set-prop -i com.lab126.blanket disable 0; \
      kill $BAT_PID $BAT_HTTP_PID $SLEEP_PID 2>/dev/null' \
     EXIT INT TERM

# ── HTTP server on port 2024: serves battery value to the dashboard ───────
BAT_PORT=2024
( while true; do
    VAL=$(cat "$BAT_FILE" 2>/dev/null || echo "?")
    BODY="${VAL}"
    RESP="HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\nContent-Type: text/plain\r\nAccess-Control-Allow-Origin: *\r\nContent-Length: ${#BODY}\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n${BODY}"
    echo -e "$RESP" | nc -l -p $BAT_PORT
  done ) &
BAT_HTTP_PID=$!
## End Kindle Dashboard additions ##

Eject the Kindle and launch the Shortcut Browser. It will take a few seconds to launch and then should show the dashboard.

Battery Tracking in Home Assistant

When Show battery in top bar is enabled, each Kindle page reads its battery level from the local HTTP server and pushes it to HA as a sensor entity via the REST API. No YAML or HA configuration is needed — the entity is created automatically on first push.

Entity naming:

Config	Entity ID	Friendly name
`device=bedroom-kindle`, location `Home`	`sensor.home_battery_bedroom_kindle`	Home Battery (bedroom-kindle)
`device=kitchen`, location `Home`	`sensor.home_battery_kitchen`	Home Battery (kitchen)
No device name, location `Home`	`sensor.home_battery`	Home Battery

The entity has device_class: battery and unit_of_measurement: %, so it integrates naturally with HA dashboards, automations, and the battery card. Battery level is only pushed when the value changes, so there is no unnecessary network traffic.

Refresh Behaviour

Method	What it does
Auto-refresh (configurable, default 60s)	Pulls fresh entity states; no page reload
↺ button (normal mode)	Same as auto-refresh, on demand
↺ button (Hard Refresh enabled)	Full page reload — re-fetches HTML, config, and assets
↺ Force Refresh (panel top bar)	Triggers a full page reload on the Kindle within 5 seconds, from your computer

File Structure

kindle_dashboard/
├── hacs.json
├── README.md
├── example_screenshot.png
└── custom_components/kindle_dashboard/
    ├── __init__.py          # Integration setup, HTTP views, multi-dashboard support
    ├── config_flow.py       # Setup wizard (supports multiple instances)
    ├── const.py             # Constants and defaults
    ├── manifest.json
    ├── strings.json + translations/en.json
    ├── websocket_api.py     # WebSocket API (get_dashboards, get/save config, force refresh)
    └── frontend/
        ├── panel.js         # HA sidebar config panel (web component)
        ├── kindle.html      # Kindle page template
        ├── mdi-kindle.woff  # Subsetted Material Design Icons font (588 icons)
        └── MDI-LICENSE     # Apache 2.0 license for the MDI font

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Kindle Dashboard

Features

Screenshot

Installation via HACS

Manual Installation

Setup

Configuring the Dashboard

Kindle URL

Configuration Backup

General

Page Dimensions & Text Styling

Sections

On Your Kindle (must be jailbroken)

Battery Tracking in Home Assistant

Refresh Behaviour

File Structure

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brand		brand
custom_components/kindle_dashboard		custom_components/kindle_dashboard
CHANGELOG.md		CHANGELOG.md
README.md		README.md
example_screenshot.png		example_screenshot.png
hacs.json		hacs.json

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Kindle Dashboard

Features

Screenshot

Installation via HACS

Manual Installation

Setup

Configuring the Dashboard

Kindle URL

Configuration Backup

General

Page Dimensions & Text Styling

Sections

On Your Kindle (must be jailbroken)

Battery Tracking in Home Assistant

Refresh Behaviour

File Structure

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