Digital Picture Frame Part 1

re: Digital Picture Frame Part 1

Brad — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 21:58:00 GMT

Oh man, you got my brain going with this one. I have an old Latitude CPa laying around without a hard drive just itching to become a picture frame ....

I may need a bit more info on how you got the image burned to CD to allow the lappy to boot to CE, but I'll fumble around for a bit first ...

Jay Ongg - Picture Frame Project...

Mikehall's Embedded WebLog — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 00:59:00 GMT

re: Digital Picture Frame Part 1

Jay Ongg — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 22:07:00 GMT

Totally cool man. I got inspired from other peoples' blogs myself :).

What software do you use to burn CDs? Alternatively, if you have both a CD and a floppy drive on your laptop, you can just use a CEPC boot disk floppy to read the image from your CD (or other mass storage devices).

I recommend first getting the software image before hacking the laptop :).

re: Digital Picture Frame Part 1

Steve Perry — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 23:50:00 GMT

Here's an idea. use a usb wifi adapter instead of the PCMCIA. You can get one that is nearly the same size as your usb drive key

re: Digital Picture Frame Part 1

Jay Ongg — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 23:57:00 GMT

Thanks for the idea. I actually looked at that as an option. However, the only USB network drivers that ship with Windows CE are USB RNDIS drivers. I talked a bit with some of the Windows CE test team to see what they tested this with, and they pretty much said that few (if any?) USB WiFi adapters use RNDIS. I guess they did their testing with wired RNDIS devices.

The existing USB WiFi devices use their own proprietary drivers (and they might not have x86 CE versions of them).

Another idea that I'm toying with for the future is to have it work with Bluetooth. The USB port worked with a Belkin Bluetooth USB dongle, so I theoretically can do something there if I wanted connectivity... Version 2.0 :)

re: Digital Picture Frame Part 1

Mike L — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 23:57:00 GMT

Jay - Way cool :)

Now for the artistic part...
Cant the L/T be positioned differently behind the matte, or is it restricted by form factor? Visually, the image is more "balanced" with a little more width (depth?) at the bottom of the frame, sort of a support/grounding effect...

Having seen it in action, I must say you've shown quite a bit of ingenuity :)

re: Digital Picture Frame Part 1

Jay Ongg — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 00:07:00 GMT

So the support/grounding effect is good or bad? I admit I have no artistic capabilities :) Oh, I can definitely reposition the laptop behind the matting, i actually discovered that I can't cut perfect 90 degree angles even with a T-Square. <sigh>

re: Digital Picture Frame Part 1

Brad — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 15:05:00 GMT

Cool. I got an imaged burned and booted on the old Latitude CPi, but the keyboard is a train wreck. Still, very cool to see it come up!

re: Digital Picture Frame Part 1

Jay Ongg — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 17:08:00 GMT

Awesome!
What do you mean the keyboard is a train wreck? Because you took it apart? or because it doesn't work with your image?

re: Digital Picture Frame Part 1

Brad — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 18:28:00 GMT

For whatever reason, it doesn't work with the image. I get characters, but not the ones I expect or in the quantities expected. Pushing 'A' makes 14 'd's and such. I tried image on a different lappy and had same result. Maybe I'll try on one of my workstations and we'll see. Any assistance greatly appreciated!

re: Digital Picture Frame Part 1

Jay Ongg — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 18:33:00 GMT

Weird... I never had those problems with the two laptops I tried. Did you make any changes to the keyboard drivers? Did you update anything? Which laptops do you have, and which design? Maybe you can try Internet Appliance and see if that works...?

So I assume you got the CD burning part working? how are you getting the image onto the device?

re: Digital Picture Frame Part 1

Brad — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 18:49:00 GMT

I just tried the image on a "white box" workstation and it worked fine, so it's someting about the laptops, one a Dell CPi (266 proc) the other a Dell CPiA (366 proc).

As far as the image goes, I just built up a simple image (no extras) and burned it to CD, then followed the steps in one of the MSDN articles for creating a CEPC boot disk. A bit of tweaking of the boot disk (adding CD driver, mounting drive, etc.) and it came right up.

Very cool, actually. Frustrated by the darn KB thing though, and suspect that I will be equally frustrated by lack of drivers for PC Card network interface. I've tried a couple of different ones, and the image recognizes something in the slot and asks for the driver name, but none of the drivers seem to work and the vendors sites are less than helpful. Any more thoughts on how you're going to make yours talk to the world?

re: Digital Picture Frame Part 1

Jay Ongg — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 18:54:00 GMT

Well, does USB work on your laptop? (does it exist?) You can use a USB Bluetooth adapter. I'm gonna blog about that in my "future directions" section :). As for PCMCIA - yeah that's annoying. Do you know what chipset you have? you can check if you boot it up in Windows XP and it's loaded up and you look in device manager.

Which image did you use? Internet Appliance? Mobile Handheld? Try it with an Internet Appliance - there's a built-in keyboard there. I don't recall if the handheld design had one by default.

re: Which language do you use to write your apps?

Windows Mobile Team Blog — Sat, 10 Jul 2004 01:28:00 GMT

Digital Picture Frame Part 2

Jay's WebLog — Sat, 10 Jul 2004 08:15:00 GMT

re: Digital Picture Frame Part 1

Jay Ongg — Sat, 10 Jul 2004 05:17:00 GMT

Just so you all know, I posted a <a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/swingbeat/archive/2004/07/09/179024.aspx">part 2</a> to this :). Let's follow up comments there!

Digital Picture Frame Part 2

Jay's WebLog — Sat, 10 Jul 2004 08:20:00 GMT

Check out Jay's weblog for this very cool project: Digital Picture Frame (Part 1)!

MSDN Webcasts Weblog — Sat, 10 Jul 2004 22:53:00 GMT

Digital Picture Frame Pt 1

Martin's .Net Diary — Sat, 24 Jul 2004 12:29:00 GMT

Digital Picture Frame Pt 1

Martin's .Net Blog — Sat, 24 Jul 2004 12:36:00 GMT

Digital Picture Frame Pt 1

Martin Dolphin's TechBlog — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 21:34:00 GMT

digital photo frame hack

digital photo frame hack — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:38:38 GMT

PingBack from http://rafael.thedigestreader.info/digitalphotoframehack.html

hacking digital picture frame

hacking digital picture frame — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 10:54:45 GMT

PingBack from http://maria.updatedigest.info/hackingdigitalpictureframe.html

Jay s WebLog Digital Picture Frame Part 1 | Quick Diets

Jay s WebLog Digital Picture Frame Part 1 | Quick Diets — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 17:20:30 GMT

PingBack from http://quickdietsite.info/story.php?id=10569

Jay s WebLog Digital Picture Frame Part 1 | storage bench

Jay s WebLog Digital Picture Frame Part 1 | storage bench — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:04:02 GMT

PingBack from http://thestoragebench.info/story.php?id=671

Jay s WebLog Digital Picture Frame Part 1 | debt consolidator

Jay s WebLog Digital Picture Frame Part 1 | debt consolidator — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:50:21 GMT

PingBack from http://mydebtconsolidator.info/story.php?id=20472