For a few years now, I’ve been hesitant to buy an e-reader. I dislike that most of them have closed ecosystems. I was waiting for a “hacker-friendly” device and had high hopes for the PineNote. Unfortunately, the price tag of the PineNote and the difficulty of getting my hands on one left me without a “cheap” alternative. The PineNote is also much more than an e-reader and significantly larger, while I was looking for an open, pocket-sized device.
Kobo is a Toronto-based company that has released several e-reading devices over the past decade, and they have had a small, active hacker community building apps and plugins for their products. Initially, their devices shipped with an internal SD card you could replace with another operating system after opening the device, but later models now run their software on eMMC. Since they offered a cheap 6-inch entry model, the Clara (BW and Color), I decided to give it a try and ordered the Clara Color.
Ever since I started porting Buildroot and Nerves to exotic devices (running Nerves on Android e-waste), each time I get a consumer device in my hands, the first question that pops into my head is:
Will it run Nerves?
This topic is about answering that question and documenting my journey to understand how the device works and how to access relevant information so I can maybe build a Nerves firmware for it. I have no clue if I will make it, but documenting the process and progress might be interesting to some people here.
I’ll be adding posts to this topic, at random intervals, with my progress in the hope of helping demystify what it takes to get Nerves and Elixir running on consumer products and to inspire others to try to do the same.
