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Use your reMarkable as a whiteboard

·2 mins

Hello World captured on the reMarkable

I’ve bought a Remarkable 2 when they were announced and received it a whopping 6 months later thanks to Covid-19. One of the reasons for me to buy it was the possibility to stream its screen to my laptop and then use it as a whiteboard to quickly sketch a diagram.

reStream just released support for the reMarkable 2 so we can start playing!

First, you’ll need an SSH access to your reMarkable. To do so, follow this path:

  • Menu button in the upper left corner
  • Settings at the bottom
  • Help at the bottom
  • Copyright and licenses

There, at the bottom, you should see:

To do so, this device acts as an USB ethernet device, and you can connect using the SSH protocol using the username ‘root’ and the password ‘XXXXXXX’

The IP address available to connect to are listed below: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

If your reMarkable is plugged via USB, you can use 10.11.99.1.

Let’s copy your ssh key over as reStream will need password-less access to your reMarkable.

ssh-copy-id root@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

I personally use this ssh config to just do ssh remarkable:

Host remarkable
	Hostname xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
	User root

You will then need to install lz4 on your computer, on Ubuntu:

sudo apt install liblz4-tool

You can then clone the git repository locally:

git clone https://github.com/rien/reStream

In it, you’ll find a precompiled binary that will act as a relay on the remMrkable, you will need to transfer it to /home/root/restream on it.

scp restream.arm.static root@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:/home/root/restream

Last, fire reStream!

./reStream.sh -s xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -p
  • -s is the source, it will use 10.11.99.1 by default as it you were connected via USB. If you’re connected differently, set the IP or hostname there.
  • -p tells reStream to switch to Portrait mode, the default is landscape.

You have plenty of other options:

  • -o remarkable.mp4 will record your display to remarkable.mp4
  • -o udp://dest:1234 -f mpegts records to a stream
  • -w will write to a v4l2-loopback device that you can use as a webcam. I tried to use this one but couldn’t as chromium couldn’t detect my device. I actually prefer to just share the stream window and keep my webcam as it is.

Enjoy!

– This is day 3/100 of #100DaysToOffLoad!

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