The Unexpected Joys Of Hacking An Old Kindle

November 24, 2025 by Tom Nardi 23 Comments

In the closing hours of JawnCon 0x2, I was making a final pass of the “Free Stuff for Nerds” table when I noticed a forlorn Kindle that had a piece of paper taped to it. The hand-written note explained that the device was in shambles — not only was its e-ink display visibly broken, but the reader was stuck in some kind of endless boot loop. I might have left it there if it wasn’t for the closing remark: “Have Fun!”

Truth is, the last thing I needed was another Kindle. My family has already managed to build up a collection of the things. But taking a broken one apart and attempting to figure out what was wrong with it did seem like it would be kind of fun, as I’d never really had the opportunity to dig into one before. So I brought it home and promptly forgot about it as Supercon was only a few weeks away and there was plenty to keep me occupied.

The following isn’t really a story about fixing a Kindle, although it might seem like it on the surface. It’s more about the experience of working on the device, and the incredible hacking potential of these unassuming gadgets. Whether you’ve got a clear goal in mind, or just want to get your hands dirty in the world of hardware hacking, you could do far worse than picking a couple of busted Kindles up for cheap on eBay.

If there’s a singular takeaway, it’s that the world’s most popular e-reader just so happens to double as a cheap and impressively capable embedded Linux development environment for anyone who’s willing to crack open the case.

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Barcodes, “Lasers”, And Fourier Transforms

November 24, 2025 by John Elliot V 14 Comments

The Bomem DA3 is a type of Fourier transform spectrometer used for measuring various spectral data and [Usagi Electric] has one. On his quest to understand it he runs down a number of rabbit holes, including learning about various barcode formats, doing a teardown of the Telxon LS-201 barcode scanner, and exploring how lasers work. That’s right: lasers!

His reason for looking at the Telxon LS-201 barcode scanner is that it has the same type of helium-neon laser as his Bomem DA3 uses. Since he’s learning about barcode scanners he thinks it’s prudent to learn about barcode formats too, and he has a discussion with our very own Adam Fabio about such things, including the UPC-A standard barcodes.

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Smelly Ultrasound

November 24, 2025 by Al Williams 26 Comments

We aren’t sure why, but [Lev Chizhov] and some other researchers have found a way to make you smell things by hitting your head with ultrasound. Apparently, your sense of smell lives in your olfactory bulb, and no one, until now, has thought to try zapping it with ultrasound to see what happens.

The bulb is somewhere behind your nose, as you might expect. This is sub-optimal for ultrasound because your nose isn’t flat, and it is full of air. Packing a subject’s nose with gel wasn’t going to win many fans. The answer was to place the transducer on the person’s forehead and shoot down at the bulb. They made a custom headset that let them precisely target areas of the subject’s bulb guided by an MRI.

So far, they have a sample size of two, but they’ve managed to induce the smell of fresh air, garbage, ozone, and burning wood. What would you do with this? Smell-o-vision? A garbage truck VR game? Let us know in the comments. We don’t think this is exactly how the last VR smell gadget we saw worked, but — honestly — we aren’t completely sure.