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What To Do With Those First Generation Photo Frames?
First time accepted submitter icepick3000 writes "There are probably many digital photoframes unused these days laying around. Mine is from the first generation meaning you can only insert a compact flash card and display photos. Newer models nowadays can display weather, news, and stocks. Anyone have some good idea's how to give these old frames a second life? I have been thinking about compact flash cards that support wifi... maybe someone has a better idea?"
Um, use them as designed? Why do you need all of those extra features for just a photo frame?
If you're still on the upgrade treadmill, give the old frames to someone who will use it.
1) Download image http://i.imgur.com/Oq3OW.jpg
2) Place image on digital photoframe.
3) Place digital photoframe outside front door.
4) ???
5) Peace and solitude.
Display photos in them you twit.
I'm not the troll icepick3000, you are.
http://dx.com/p/sdhc-sd-mmc-to-cf-type-ii-card-adapter-upto-32gb-22338 ...or, send the frame to me, and I'll buy an adapter.
A giant wall of porn to great you when you, er, come home. /burn karma, burn!
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
I'm actually slightly disappointed, slashdot AC trolls.
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Pray your old photo frame supports SD cards
Use the GPIO on your Arduino/RaspberryPi/Anything network connectable really to emulate an SD card with a filesystem and produce the images to display stock prices/weather/intertubes content on your legacy photo frame.
Take headshots of your significant other looking very impatient, occasionally slightly moving to create the appearance of a live image. Glue a black plastic sequin to the middle of the top frame so it looks like a built in camera. Set the frame in portrait orientation and have it display the images in quick succession on your desk. Then whenever someone you don't want to talk to approaches, start apologizing to the frame, then turn it around for them to see, and whisper this: "I've got my wife on the telescreen... I have to take this call..." Bonus points if it is your wife who you avoid talking to in this way.
Use them as a video output device.
Many picture frames can be hacked and used as displays. Cheap and very handy for devices lacking traditional a traditional video out.
Some smart people have been working on this over at the Doozan forum.
Aren't those things called "tablets" nowadays?
Do not feed the trolls!
Turn them in to cheap displays.
Many picture frames can be hacked to act as low-fps displays for Linux devices. Cheap and handy for devices lacking a traditional video out.
The smart folks over at the Doozan forum have been working in this for some time now.
Wow, I don't own any digital photo frames yet and wasn't aware we had hit "generations" of them now. I was wanting one that could display animated gifs if anything so I could do something like a Harry Potter-ish moving picture such as these. Either that or a e-paper one so it would run off batteries for weeks.
Do you want a bigger house? Own your own business? Climb Kilimanjaro? Put frames that show those goals into it and let the photo frames remind you. This will make a powerful subconscious urge for you to achieve your goals.
Do you want to learn rote things, such as another language? How about showing word - translation flashcards for the language, or whatever information you need to know. Put them on your desk and occasionally glance over and try to guess which translation will follow the shown word. (Or the times tables, or whatever info you want.)
How about installing quick-reference sheets for work? (I personally have an ASCII chart hanging in my office since I can never remember the codes.) You can have a "perl quick reference sheet", "perl debugger sheet", "Cisco router quick reference sheet" and so on. Most of the frames have buttons to stop or flip through the images - find the reference sheet you need and freeze it.
The photo frame can hold all sorts of static information within limitations.
Get your elderly grandparents photo albums and scan all the pictures. Load them on to the photo frame and give it away to them. Bonus points if you get your grandparents to give a little description of many of the photos before they pass away.
Best present ever... except the scanning of 60 photo albums :(
e.g on openwrt
https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=34133
Where are the nerds today?
Seriously, are you joking? Not only are tear-downs not rare here, and iFixit not obscure at all but they're basically the king of internet device tear-downs, but while they specialize in Apple stuff, they do a helluva lot more too...and they get linked to from slashdot, or as the primary source from articles linked to from slashdot, all the time.
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Laying what? Eggs?
If you photo frame is capable of laying anything you'd best keep it and monetize that bad-boy.
You seem very angry about some guy who just wants to tinker with some old piece of electronics.
It's just that it's so very lame to ask a question that is essentially "what can I do with an LCD panel?". If you don't know already, you probably will have no use for the answer.
It's also a bit absurd to think a photo frame it broken because it doesn't display something besides photos you can get more easily and with better detail on your smart phone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Put recipes on it, store in the kitchen.
I tried that but it was pretty hard to make a soufflé before the five seconds were up.
Scan manuals you use frequently.
I had to wait an hour for the instruction manual for my mixer to come up.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think you mean second generation photo frames. The first generation had superior DPI, didn't use any power and was a lot cheaper. It was also often made of wood.
Only dumb birds land downwind.
which I upgrade by taking the back off and putting a new photo in it.... .. maybe something to experiment is CF to SD adapter and see if you can push new images on the fly to a eye fi card?
back on topic
Why the fuck would you want the weather or anything else in your photo frame. It's a fucking photo frame.
Hey slashdot, I have a cat but my cat doesn't display the traffic conditions outside my house, what can I do to upgrade to a second-generation cat?
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Turn them into some kind of art project.
Run linux on them.
Connect them to an arduino or raspberry pi.
Send them into space using cubesat, as a kickstarter project.
Write a slashdot article about them (oh wait, you already did that).
Or my personal favorite: Sell them.
one 0r 7he other
what bot ton use the photo-frame for. (no don't look)
Why not display images on them? Start with this one, you bent-wristed neckwetter.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This is Slashdot 2012, home of console gamers and modding everything as troll and flamebait that people don't agree with.
The real hackers moved on. They didn't tell me where. Hackers and my parents... is it so hard to leave a forwarding address?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
No text
We seem to get a "What to do with this useless crap I bought 2 years ago?" question every month.
Don't buy it in the first place!
If you think you want to buy something, write it down in a "could_buy.txt" list.
Take a look one month later, and more often than not, you'll ask yourself why you even considered it.
Carefully remove the LCD panel, electronics and power supply from the frame a discard them.
Now print out one of your favourite photos on glossy paper, and mount it in the now-empty frame behind a piece of glass. Put it on your wall or mantelpiece for a beautiful display that you will treasure.
Anyone have some good idea's how to give these old frames a second life?
Display a different grammar rule every day. You can start with correct use of apostrophes.
I like your sig. When, oh when is someone with brains, insight and money going to option, fund, script and produce the Amber series? Jeez, it can't be that difficult in this day and age.
Oh, I forgot, it's not a comic book.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
...when is someone with brains, insight and money....
In Hollywood? Where are you going to find one person with all three?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
what if you put some favourite pix on a compact flash card, load it in there... and use the thing to look at the photos or display them to visitors ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
If there was some way to connect the old photo frame to the digital output of a Raspberry Pi, it would be awesome for many different reasons to have a Linux box with a photo frame display. I imagine the custom hardware would be difficult to set up. Each LCD photo display is probably different, and the circuitry would be a hassle since the photo display was never meant to accept input, and then you have HDMI output from the RP. By the time you got through, you'd be looking at the price of a low-end Android tablet, which is the RP's biggest problem - by the time you do anything useful with it, you're looking at the price of a low-end tablet.
Glue 4 of them together in a box shape, solder all the usb sockets together and upload a totally white pic. Now you have a unique lamp.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
For me, a "first generation photo frame" is a... photo frame, like the ones you've used your entire life, you know... made of wood.
how to give these old frames a second life?
Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuurn !
Help the new owner load some pics of the grandkids from their kids' Facebook page.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I used three cheap-o digital photo frames (that my wife and I received over the years as gifts) for the displays in a jet cockpit set piece for a short film I made. They worked great - the slideshow feature worked well to display updating info on the tactical display, etc. The main display was an old IBM 17" LCD monitor I had in my closet. They weren't used to cure science or find alien intelligence, but they looked great in the scene.
Can those things display animated gifs? Because they would be absolutely perfect for cinemagraphs.
Technoli
is there even anyone there with insight?
This. Whenever I want to buy something, I just tell myself "no."
When I get tired of telling myself "no" after a few months, then I say "yes." I usually end up with nothing but extra money and less clutter.
I will sell you my limited stock of media for $500 per 120 MB disk.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
With the help of a vector graphics editor (like Inkscape or Illustrator), you can easily construct images that say whatever you want and thus use those digital photo frames, which can be set to automatically rotate repeatedly through all the images you feed them, pausing for 15 or 30 seconds on each image) as a cheap but effective replacement for one of those expensive digital signage systems.
Updating the images does mean you have to walk around to each of the frames and update its memory card, but for a small installation (up to about a dozen screens) this is not a deal breaker, considering how much money you are saving.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Take screen-shots of a n-headed Beowulf Cluster at regular intervals then put them on on your screen's memory cards.
Play them back and hope they don't get out of sync.
Then make a YouTube video and see who you fool.
Yeah, it's low tech and fake, but you'll get points for style.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm guessing they probably don't have enough Flash to be useful simply by 'rooting' them so just installing an X server is out. If I am wrong then that is probably the way to go. However, there have been a lot of display driver boards on EBay lately. They are marketed towards allowing people to take the screens from old laptops and make them useful again as monitors. There are ones that do VGA, DVI, HDMI, Composite, etc and various combinations of those. Some have built in audio amplifiers so you could add speakers if you want to.
You have to find a board that is compatible with your LCD. You would have to take the frame apart and identify the LCD model and then go to EBay. They usually list the models each board supports in the ad plus you have to tell them which one you have when you order so they can flash the right firmware for you. I have no idea how likely your photo frames are to be supported by any of those boards. I know they are usually marketed towards use with old laptop screens but maybe some of the photo frames were similar? It could be worth a try.
If you do that there are also touch sensor kits available, you could add touch capability. You could even add a Raspberry Pi or any one of a number of similar devices and make something self contained out of it rather than a monitor. I doubt you will fit the LCD, Raspberry Pi and the driver board all back into the frame though (but then again, you might). You will probably have to make a new box for it.
If you are really good with LCD then you might be able to skip the driver board and connect the LCD directly to the Raspberry Pi, or maybe with just a DSI chip. If you were up for that though I doubt you would be asking about this here.
Whatever you decide to do, you probably would do better asking this on the forums over at Hack a Day rather than Slashdot.
Or... just fill it full of objectionable content, leave it in a public place and wait for the fireworks to start.
Get a couple hundred screens together and replace your drywall. Now you can avoid painting your walls... or create an 'X-ray' vision window by hooking up a camera on the other side of the wall, with possibly an attractive girl next door changing image. You get where I'm going with this...
It is not a "photo frame". It is a full-featured, though weak, embedded computer with a LCD display. Just because it has a limited firmware and marketers call it a "photo frame" does not take away from its inherent nature.
What's it with people these days that they let themselves be limited with how things are named?
Or if you don't have the talent, take it to a local maker-group for assistance.
Or use it to fill the coffers of a recycler
Or help fill all that unused landfill space
How abut as digital "now playing" arcade marquees?
Like this: http://hackaday.com/2012/01/19/adding-digital-game-indicators-to-a-neo-geo-arcade-cabinet/
They're programmed to cycle through all 20 NeoGeo arcade game cartridges I own (and a few I -want- to own...), or any other images I feel like putting up there.