A general repository for my Kindle hacking ideas.
The goal is to make a remote controller from Kindle. Because it seems there’s no easy way to make Kindle talk wirelessly to a computer directly, this hack will require Internet access for both Kindle and target computer.
The idea of converting Kindle to a presentation remote may seem weird, as there are many better alternatives for controllers - cellphones, smartphones, dedicated presentation remotes, etc. Well, I don’t have a smartphone, nor a dedicated controller; Bluetooth in the phone is a kludge, and I just got a Kindle and I want to play around with it ;). As an added value, I want to have Kindle display notes for presentation, which beats phones and dedicated controllers.
The project is composed of two main parts - a webapp for receiving user input and displaying notes, and an actuator for switching slides and fetching the notes. The components are separate and one should be able to deploy them on separate machines or on a single computer.
The idea is to create a web app that will interface Kindle with target computer, so that one could use Kindles build-in browser to control the presentation.
The client side of the application will capture keys that user presses and transfer them to web server, which will delegate proper actions to the second part of this project - the remote Actuator. It will also receive new batches of notes to dynamically display on the page.
This component will be responsible for issuing commands to presentation software, for example by faking keyboard input. I want it to work not only with PowerPoint, but also with Prezi.
Moreover, this part will also send back presentation notes on request. I think it is good to keep presentation and presentation notes together.