planetsurfer

Use a cheap digital picture frame as a secondary display

Ingenious hack to enable those cheap tiny keychain digital picture frame to display videos from your desktop

Jeroen Domburg provides instructions on how to hack those ubiquitous keychain digital picture frames so that it can stream video from a desktop (unfortunately, only for the Linux/Mac? at this point)

Jeroen provides a detailed analysis of the internals of the digital picture frame, and the steps he took to be able to stream a video from his cpu to the device. Other individuals have developed their own apps to display cool widgets on the lcd such as integration into flickr to display images from the Internet and lcd4linux, which make the lcd a mini console.

He also provides a download (tgz) for the software necessary to modify the firmware of the digital picture frame to enable this awesome hack.

Heres a youtube video of a video stream to the device:

Original Site Here: http://spritesmods.com/?art=picframe&page=1
He has also setup a wiki here: http://picframe.spritesserver.nl/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

This is an awesome hack, as it could be possible to enable these cheap digital picture frames to act as a secondary monitor that can display widgets such as IM notifications, twitter, rss feeds, CPU and memory utilization, photshop tool details, stock feeds, email notifications, mrtg graphs, system monitoring notifications etc!

Apparently this Digital Picture Frame from Amazon or this one from dealextreme works with the mod/hack. Here is a complete list of compatible devices

I have a handful of these digital picture frames (innovage) I purchased. The wiki states this model is untested, but not incompatible. I will be testing it in the next few days with my ASUS EEE, stay tuned!

06/08/08 – Update! It Works! After some unix wranglin, and pouring over the disassembled code, this picture frame definitely works! Ill be updating the wiki and sending the specs over ASAP

06/08/08 – Brain Dump: I used a Asus 8g EEE PC to dump the firmware, split the binaries then read the hex as instructed. The instructions on the Readme is fairly well done, but there were a few speed bumps to get this fully working on my unix laptop. (Downloading packages, manually compiling GD,make clean, loading up the perl disassembler, download imagemagick etc)

06/17/08 – Tried to send the config files and hacked firmware to burn to Jeroen so it can be included in the his download, but the email kept bouncing. Here is the download if you want to burn it into the Innovage frame (So you dont have to dump it, disassemble, read through the hex, hack the firmware, reassemble) You sill need to burn the firmware to the frame though.

innovage firmware