Building an E-ink RSS Reader

Goal: read RSS on my Bigme HiBreak Pro without fighting the UI.

I use EinkBro as my browser because it lets you map volume buttons to scroll up/down—essential for one-handed reading. Problem is, feedbin.com doesn’t scroll correctly with volume buttons. The page jumps around, loses position, and the whole experience feels broken.

So I built Paperbin. One article at a time, simple vertical layout, arrow key navigation that EinkBro’s volume buttons trigger perfectly. Flask backend, Feedbin API for sync, plain HTML output.

The key thing that made it usable was preloading the next article in the background. Before that, every tap felt slow because e-ink refresh + network latency = painful. Now it’s instant.

Tradeoffs:

• Only works with Feedbin (I’ve tried a few RSS services and Feedbin’s parser is the best at extracting full article content, so I’m happy to be locked in)
• No offline mode (tablet is always on wifi anyway)
• Self-hosted (running on my NAS in Docker)

Added a settings menu: dark mode for desktop use, font size, hide images toggle. Images cause the worst ghosting so hiding them makes a big difference on e-ink.

Links: GitHub ・ Project page