MachineGrid::Robots at Work

Digital Picture Frame Hacking Roundup

With all the nice hacks on digital picture frames scattered around the web, I decided to put them all in one place for reference. Due thanks to all the hackers out there who put their work out for everyone to see. It’s the joy in reverse engineering. For some of the hacks I’ve included a compressed file with the code and webpage archived in case the original site goes down. If you are the author an would not like it, please let me know.

Please read : If you would like to be notified of new frames being hacked, leave a comment below and check the “subscribe to comments” box.


PHILIPS Picture Frames
[v]incent was able to display his images directly to the frame by writing a little script which prepends a binary header to the JPEG file. There is a detailed writeup on how he reverse engineered the picture frame format.

Detailed info:

• Models: 7FF1AW, 7FFICMI
• Webpage[Archive]
• jpg2frame Script



CEIVA Picture Frames
The CEIVA runs on a Cirrus Logic Maverick(EP7212) controller. It’s based on a ARM720T core with 2Mb Flash and 4Mb DRAM.
Initial hack done by [c]olin. The frame runs on Linux. Necessary patches and images are provided. [b]rad keeps a worklog here
New code can be loaded via a serial port on the PCB through a simple level converter.




Detailed info:

• Models : Not Specified
• Webpage
• Webpage and Code [Archive]



KeyChain Displays
[j]eroen from Spritesmods maintains a wiki of compatible keychain displays with his firmware hack. He and a couple of guys regularly update it with new displays. Most of the displays use the SITRONIX ST2205U controller in them. I tried my hand in doing the same with the Hannah Montana Vu-Me photo frame. I got close, but bricked it in the end.
Their code is maintained at Google code

Detailed info:

• Models:
• TomTec
• Coby DP-151SX/DPKEY
• HK unbranded
• Keypix
• Dealxtreme SKU5218
• Innovage
• Dig-291
• Innovalley
• Webpage
• Wiki
• Google code



DIGITAL SPECTRUM MemoryFrame
The MemoryFrames run on WindowsCE5. [r]etoor from mozy.org managed to crash the frame using a keyboard, mouse and following a sequence. The frame runs on an ARM920T – a 32bit Arm9 processor. The following is an excerpt from his “YouTube’s more info…” link:
…”Basically you need both the mouse and keyboard plugged in, scroll down past the “Settings” option, scroll back up, and click the word “Settings” with your mouse. There is no enter key on the keyboard so you have to click the mouse….”


Detailed info:

• YouTube
• Buy – Amazon



SAMSUNG SPF-83v Frames
The frame parses feeds and regular html pages for images and displays them. You can use the frame’s i-net-functions to serve it data.
[t]obe from Infolexikon uses PHP to gather data and writes it all to an image using gd. These images are then pushed to the frame at regular intervals.

Detailed info:

• Webpage
• Script-[Original][Archive] Thanks for the update [d]p
• Buy – Amazon



JUICEBOX Digital Frames
[j]oevennix managed to rip out the LCD from a Juicebox and enclose it in his own custom frame. He didn’t have the mp3 kit at that time( although you can get it online), so he soldered a SD card slot into the cartridge connector. His webpage is down. The following is an archive of his work.

Detailed info:

• Archive
• Pdf



If you find this interesting or have some new ideas or links on frames, please post in the comments. Don’t forget to Subscribe [email]for more followups and hacks. To get updates on this page, subscribe to the comments below.

Posted in Hackable Toys, Tutorials, hacks | 11 Comments »

Hacking the Hannah Montana Photocube – Almost!

Things with LCDs are very interesting. I found a Hannah Montana Digital Photocube on sale and decided to look what’s inside it. Good for a day of hacking :)

First a description:

• Storage capacity: 8 M bit (Up to 70 photos) Resolution: 128×128 dpi
• Display: 1.5-inch color LCD
• Supported File Format: JPG (JPEG),BMP, GIF, PNG, & TIF
• Power: 2 xAAA batteries (not included)
• USB Ports: Mini-USB 1.1 interface

Searching around the net produced a lot of work done by Sprite. He and a couple of guys maintain a wiki containg information about hacked lcd keychains. Most of the keychains that have been hacked contain a ST2205U Microcontroller. With this information I proceeded ripping apart my photocube. This was what was inside:

A 1Mb A29L800( datasheet ) flash chip and a micrcontroller hidden behind a big black blob along with the LCD, buttons, USB port and an on-off switch. With some reading on Sprite’s blog and modifyng his script a little, I was able to verify that the microcontroller was indeed a ST2205U. If you browse through main.c, a function is_photoframe checks if the controller is a ST2205U. So I inserted a printf(“Response : %s\n”,buff) to verify if the chip gave back the correct string, which it did.

/*
Checks if the device is a photo frame by reading the first 512 bytes and
comparing against the known string that's there
*/
int is_photoframe(int f) {
int y,res;
char id[]="SITRONIX CORP.";
char *buff;
buff=malloc_aligned(0x200);
lseek(f,0x0,SEEK_SET);
y=read(f,buff,0x200);
buff[15]=0;
printf("Response : %s\n",buff);
// fprintf(stderr,"ID=%s\n",buff);
res=strcmp(buff,id)==0?1:0;
free_aligned(buff,0x200);
return res;
}

I’ll try documenting my steps going further. It’s in Linux( RedHat ) since I work on it, and you could do the same using a linux live cd.

1. Unpack Sprite’s hack from here. You will need to install libgd if you don’t have it. As root install gd-devel. Please read the README file in the unpacked directory. It’s written for a reason.

yum install gd-devel

2. Then as a user type “make” in the unpacked directory. This will compile the hack to give you the “phack” binary.

3. Now connect the photocube and turn it on. You will see “USB Connect” displayed on the screen. Open a terminal on your linux machine and type

dmesg | tail

This will give you any hardware information that occurred last. You will see the following:

If you see something like:

4096 512-byte hdwr sectors (2 MB)

then your close. Also note where your cube is mounted so you can access it. If you look at the pic above it says “Attached scsi removable disk sdg”, which means that the cube is mounted at /dev/sdg

4. Now to hack the firmware.
WARNING : Anything you do after this is at your own risk.

Type the following as root in your terminal, using the mount point which you got from step 3.

./hackfw.sh /dev/sdg

You will see the following as checks are made and eventually an error:

Sprite’s script makes a backup of the firmware and an image of the memory. It however says that “The hack won’t work for my Firmware.” When I looked into the script, it looks if my cube’s firmware is same as Sprite’s when he hacked his keychain, which is an entirely different product.

dd if=fwimage.bin bs=256 skip=58 count=2 of=fwbit 2>/dev/null
#check for all FFs Md5sum may not be _the_ tool for that, but it works OK.
if ! md5sum fwbit | grep -q de03fe65a6765caa8c91343acc62cffc; then
echo "No room at the location we want to place the hack!"
echo "This specific hack won't work for this particular firmware, I'm sorry."
exit 1;
fi

I did not have anything to loose, so I commented it out to bypass the check. Just put a “#” to comment out code.

5. I ran the script again (run as root), this time it went through the whole flashing process, till I rebooted

6. The script ends with “No Photoframe found here”. Turn off, Disconnect, Turn On and the Connect the photoframe. Get the mount point as in step 3. Type the following as root.

You should see the following on the LCD

The script allows a maximum of 10 characters. Another example

I was however unsuccessful in getting PNGs or JPEGs uploaded to the device. That’s when I bricked my cube trying different memory addresses. It doesn’t even turn on now. I’ll update when I get my hands on another one. If you have any questions or comments, you could enter them below. Thanks for reading and don’t forget to Subscribe for more followups and hacks.

Posted in Hackable Toys, Tutorials, hacks | 9 Comments »