A Wearable Pipboy 3000

[Zachariah Perry] builds a lot of replica props, and judging from the first few offerings on his blog he’s quite good at it. We enjoyed looking in on the Captain America shield and Zelda treasure chest (complete with music, lights, and floating heart container). But his most recent offering is the wearable and (kind of) working Pipboy 3000 from the Fallout series.

From his description in the video after the break it sounds like the case itself came as a promotional item that was part of a special edition of the game. He’s done a lot to make it functional though. The first thing to notice is the screen. It’s domed like the surface of a CRT, but there’s obviously not enough room for that kind of thing. The dome is made from the lens taken out of a slide viewer. It sits atop the screen of a digital picture frame. [Zachariah] loaded still images from the game into the frame’s memory, routing its buttons to those on the Pipboy. He also added a 12 position rotary switch which toggles between the lights at the bottom of the screen.

A little over a year ago we saw a more or less fully functional Pipboy. But that included so many added parts it was no longer wearable.

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Linux Picture Frame Serves As Wireless Raspberry Pi Display

Here’s a novel approach to adding a display to your Raspberry Pi. Instead of using a wired display — either via the HDMI (which can feed a DVI port with a simple hardware adapter) or the composite video out — [Chris Bryden] decided to use Bluetooth to provide a wireless display. This really depends on the hardware that you have available. He snapped up a hackable digital picture frame for a song and used the 320×240 display for this project.

You can see the USB nub plugged into the RPi in the image above. It’s a Bluetooth dongle and there’s with a matching one on the digital frame. With the two networked in such a way [Chris] got to work setting up a VNC that would let him pull up the X desktop over the network.

This ends up being one of the best uses we’ve seen for the Bluetooth protocol, and the small screen offers a huge advantage over the use of a simple character display.

This Digital Picture Frame Runs Linux Better Than You Might Think

Ah, the beauty of spreading the guts of some hackable hardware across your workbench. This happens to be the circuit board and LCD screen from a Parrot DF3120 digital picture frame. The device is pretty powerful, considering you can still find them available for around $25. You’ll get a 3.5″ screen, ARM9 processor with 8MB or RAM, Bluetooth, a tilt sensor, and more. It seem that [BusError], [Sprite_tm], [Claude], and few others really went to town and spilled all of the secrets this device has to offer.

Their goal of the hack was to get their own Linux kernel running. It is possible to reprogram the processor using its JTAG interface. And if you really want to drill down to the good stuff, there’s access to all of the BGA pins on the bottom of the board thanks to a grid of micro vias. But the device can be tricked into flashing your own firmware just by altering a stock upgrade image.

You can get a pretty good idea of what there is to do once you’ve replaced the firmware from the video after the break. A RAM upgrade (using a chip from an old PC133 stick) lets the video run smoothly as it’s controlled via a Wii remote.

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Adding A Little Polish To Your Cellphone Charging Setup

Cable management can really be an eyesore, but a little creative camouflage and you can have a cellphone charging station that also serves as decoration.

[Kitesurfer] wanted to use one of the cubbyholes in his new Ikea book shelf for charging but wasn’t keen on the rat’s nest of wires that would go along with it. Also not wanting to take on the challenge of wireless charging he hit the As-Is section of the home furnishing giant and grabbed a leftover board that matched the same finish as the cabinetry. It now serves as a false-back for the charging center behind which a power strip and wall-warts hide.

This covers up the problem, but a blank white box filled with the business end of the charging wires isn’t a whole to better. As with a magic show, the trick is in redirection. [Kitesurfer] cut a hole in the false-back and added the guts of a digital picture frame. Right now he’s got it scrolling through different charging icons, but it’s easy enough to change up the slide-show if he gets tired of them. We’d love to see a subsequent hack that lets the picture frame access the photos on your phone via Bluetooth.

Wifi Sniffing Digital Picture Frame

[AUTUIN] sent in a tip for his wifi sniffing digital picture frame.

A soon-to-be-trashed Pentium II laptop was rescued from Free Geek Vancouver. A lot of coffee shops around Vancouver feature local art and free wifi, so [AUTUIN] decided to combine the two. The project is designed to hang on the wall of a cafe and sniff images transmitted on the wireless network – an invasion of privacy, but as [AUTUIN] says, “that’s kind of the point.”

After gutting the laptop and putting it in a custom picture frame, Driftnet, a program that listens network traffic and picks out images from TCP streams, was installed. [AUTUIN] tested his build with an open wireless connection in his building. The results provided a wonderful narrative that started with pictures from news sites than slowly devolved to pictures from a hot-or-not style website, an online dating site and finally pictures from the inevitable conclusion of that browsing session.

[AUTUIN] is now looking for either a brave or foolish local coffee shop in Vancouver to feature his wifi sniffing picture frame. We think this would be very amusing if we weren’t using that network, not that we have something to hide or anything.

LCD: Replacing CCFL With LEDs

[Fileark] had the backlight on his digital picture frame go out one day. These are generally Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamps which require an inverter to source the voltage necessary for proper operation. When they stop working, the inverter is usually to blame. Since that circuit is made up of pretty small surface mount circuitry, he decided to replace the backlight with LEDs rather than repair the inverter.

In the video after the break [Fileark] will walk through the entire project. After snooping around inside the picture frame he sizes up a strip of LEDs on a flexible substrate. The metal retaining bracket that hosts the LCD must be altered to fit the new light source and for that, he’s included a hacking montage in his video. The final result looks stock and he estimates the screen is around 97% as bright as with the original backlight.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen an LED edge-lit upgrade. The last one we saw even used a custom PCB to host the LEDs.

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Is That Some Type Of New Kindle?

[Mr C Camacho] picked up an inexpensive digital picture frame hoping to hack into it. He hasn’t had the time to crack open the hardware so that it will do his bidding but he did find a creative way to make it an ebook reader. Using a python script he processes books, creating images of the pages.

The python script, available after the break, takes free books from Project Gutenburg and spits out JPG images. Page turning and bookmarking are not what they ought to be but the process does work. The thought of someone staring at a picture frame on the subway is a bit amusing but we’re sure that sooner or later someone will ask if it’s a new version of the Kindle.

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