[Tobe] shares living accomodations with a few other people, so he built this tool to help them all communicate. using a Samsung SPF-83v wifi enabled picture frame, he’s made a central location for things like shopping lists and messages. He uses PHP for the database accessing and writes it all to an image using gd. Every 15 minutes a cron job runs that pushes the updated image to the picture frame.
Nice idea. But I was unable to find the script.
Does any one know of any sites showing hacks of picture frames. Any info on the chip/os used?
Following are hacks to Keychain frames:
http://spritesmods.com/?art=picframe
http://www.machinegrid.com/2009/02/hacking-the-hannah-montana-photocube/
whoo! first comment!
Seems interesting. Might wanna include support for a “wall of shame” feature. Great way to let everyone else in the house in on an embarrassing weekend.
Great idea! Just turned my old laptop into a digital photo frame and have been looking for ideas…
Pity he didn’t publish his scripts.
oh goody, now the honey do list cant be “accidentally” washed when I do laundry
The picture on the bottom…is instructions for how to use a penis pump….wtf?
Cute, but I doubt it beats a whiteboard for leaving quick messages.
LMAO! At the penis pump instructions in the picture frame!
I have an older off brand frame i have been saving for a project, while it might not work exactly the same in my house (me wife and child) it would be nice to have an image in rotation that i can change dynamically since we all see it often, i’ll have to look into this after my concert tonight
php GD is a breeze to use… it’s what mygamercard.net uses to produce Xbox Live gamer card images, I once whipped up a script to make a forum signature image display the title of the latest WordPress blog post for a friend. and there are dozens of scrips out there that use it to auto water mark your images.
Some picture frames can grab images off of a network.. reading the page they mentioned this “With the web-interface (http://IP_OF_FRAME:5050) you can control the i-net-functions of the frame:
Either it gets his images from windows-live-space (whatever this is), or it parses feeds and regular html-pages and gehts the images for you. Alas, it refuses to parse php-pages.”
That’s probably how he updated the image. While he didn’t post his script anyone with a basic knowledge of php should be able to duplicate it.
I’ve got an old Dell laptop that I was gonna give the photo frame treatment and build in wifi connectivity for RSS feeds. Fun stuff.
I was thinking of doing this in our house, just one touch screen laptop for messages and whatnot.
I can see the ad now:
“The digital message board, for telling your roomates to pick up sugar, beer, and better instructions for your penis pump.”
I know this was probably done as a fun exercise, but when I look at this kind of thing, I can’t help thinking – why not just use a damn laptop with a web browser? bigger screen, more functional, probably cheaper than that frame
Hey guys!
First, i didnt want to publish the scripts yet, because they simply look ugly and you all would stab me in the face for having to read them :)
Second, i create the image on the server and simply give the image-url to the picture-frame
Third, i chose the penis-pump, cause when i was searching for a pic for the “Saugen”-item (which means VACUUM-cleaning, btw), this was on the first result-page :)
rb:
the picture frame cost about 100€, so i think thats not more expansive than a complete old laptop. and dont forget power consumption, too…
Interesting, could have many uses via a touchscreen.
I wonder if the same could be done with a cheapo digi frame and an eye-fi wifi sd card. ????
no idea how the eye-fi’s work…
I think I’ll look into this – I bought a “Wifi enabled” Kodak frame, unfortunately it will only download pictures over Wifi from a proprietary app or Kodak’s own site. I was hoping for it to just appear as a remote device on the LAN, or alternatively grab images from a network share. Anyone got any pointers?
mattyb you could sniff the network to see the address that the picture frame access for its images and then use a dns spoof to your own server.
I second fyrebug’s eye-fi comments.
The Eye-Fi won’t work. It’s upload only. It won’t download files.
mattyb, what model is it? Some Kodak frames will pull from any Media RSS URL.
andieh: You’re right about power consumption. The model shown here (Samsung SPF-83V) drew only 9 watts when I was testing it. Full review here: http://ourdoings.com/2008-03-01
Yeah its a real shame that WiFi digital pic frames are still a bit prohibitively expensive (at least in the UK it seems) as I’d love to do something like this. I’d hate to have to pay >£100 for only an electronic noticeboard. I only have an SD card based dpf at the mo, only cost me £40 from a supermarket tho!
In the absence of the ability to hack these devices wide open to turn them general purpose, this hack is a great start. Its a shame the large proliferation of different manufacturers builds means hacking only one of them open has little impact on the whole.
It seems still that very old second hand laptops off ebay are the way to go for something like this, the screens are typically larger too, still feels a little wasteful tho on energy and utilisation of it all.
Gr8 work!
Why use cron? Wouldn’t it be easier to immediately push a new image whenever a change occurs?
anyway too run linux on it and use it as a netbook?
Just a word about hackable picture frames. We at Bearstech (small French Open Source services company) are reselling the Openmoko Freerunner for a while now. We are considering designing and reselling a picture frame on the same model. The specifications would be:
– 400 Mhz ARM (Samsung 2440) with 32MB RAM
– 128MB internal flash storage, SD/MMC/MS memory cards
– 8″ 800×600 LCD (no touchscreen)
It would be at least $140, for a few thousand orders.
This would therefore be hackable in the sense that:
– casing CAD files would be public
– access to the bootloader
– Linux support off the shelf
We would like to know if you think this would be interesting for you, to have a better idea on the numbers and pricing. We want to enable people to do such hacks with minimum effort, and eventually evolve our software distribution (hackable:1) to seemlessly interface with the picture frame: the actual touchscreen could be on our Openmoko for instance :)
Ah right, our english-friendly web page is there:
http://bearstech.com/english
and you can use our hackable-devices mailing-list to discuss this:
http://list.bearstech.com/mailman/listinfo/hackable-devices
Happy hacking :)
related:
O2 Unveils Joggler Electronic Post-It Device
http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2009/3/5/o2-unveils-joggler-electronic-post-it-device/
That’s awesome!!! I look for digital frames.And how to choose it.I saw many websites about this but your websites is the best for me.I love this site.Thank you
I spotted this…. http://www.hackthejoggler.com …could be promising as the joggler lacks load of cool options like a browser!!
think I’ll keep an eye out or get good real quick and earn the 1000pounds they are offering!!!