After jailbreaking a 7th‑generation Kindle Paperwhite, the author sought a way to run Rust on the device. The goal was to create a nightstand clock and later a Home Assistant dashboard. Rust required targeting ARMv7 with musl libc, so the author turned to cargo‑zigbuild, a cross‑compile tool that bundles Zig’s musl headers.

Building a simple hello‑world binary with cargo zigbuild --release --target armv7-unknown-linux-musleabihf yielded a working executable. To transfer it, the author used USBNetwork to set up SSH over USB or Wi‑Fi, copying a public key to /mnt/us/usbnet/etc/authorized_keys. Once logged in, the binary printed “Hello, World!” to stdout, confirming the toolchain worked on the Kindle device and that was a critical step before moving to GUI.

Next, the author tackled Slint, a Rust GUI framework. By implementing a LineBufferProvider that writes rasterized lines to /dev/fb0 and issuing ioctl() to refresh the e‑ink screen, the display worked. Touch input came from /dev/input/event1, parsed into Slint events via the kernel’s multi‑touch protocol. After debugging, a counter app ran, proving the Kindle‑ready Slint backend for future dashboard projects on the device.