nathanmarlor/inkling

Inkling is a hobby project that lets you draw a rough sketch on a reMarkable 2 tablet, circle it, tap a button, and have an AI redraw it as a clean, polished illustration right on the same page. Scribble a bike and you get a neat pen and ink drawing of a bike in its place. If you write a question by hand instead of drawing, the tool reads your handwriting and writes an answer back underneath it in ink. The project is described by its author as a proof of concept, not a polished product. It is not affiliated with reMarkable, the company that makes the tablet, and it only targets one specific device and its current operating system version. Under the hood, the project is made of three parts. A small program written in Rust runs on the tablet itself, reading your selected pen strokes and sending them off to an AI model, then drawing the result back as real pen strokes on the page. A second piece is an extension that hooks into the tablet's existing interface software, adding the AI button into the tablet's own selection menu and handling the screen capture and loading animation. A third piece contains the core logic, like converting images into pen strokes, that can be tested separately from the tablet itself. To use it, you need a reMarkable 2 tablet with root access enabled, a separate tool called xovi installed on the tablet, and an API key from a service called OpenRouter, since the AI processing happens through cloud based image and vision models rather than on the tablet itself. Setting it up also requires cross compiling the Rust code for the tablet's processor architecture and copying the resulting files onto the device using a provided deployment script, followed by a one time calibration step so the tool can accurately draw back onto the touchscreen. The README also documents a number of technical discoveries made while reverse engineering the tablet's closed software, including how to safely inject pen strokes, capture the screen, and clear drawings without crashing the tablet's interface.