This hack is so impressive that I had to put it up here. I am really surprised that a dated piece of hardware[circa 1964] can still work with today’s technology. [p]hreakMonkey got his hands on a Livermore acoustic modem and managed to get it online and download a Wikipedia page.
What’s really amazing is that the modem works by placing an old school telephone over the modem’s “receiver” and communicates using acoustic tones. The only challenging part for [p]hreakMonkey was to search for an appropriate DB9-DB25 connector. He used minicom, which is a Linux terminal (equivalent to Hyperterminal in Windows) to talk to the modem.
gphoto2 is a neat little command line interface to talk to digital cameras. The Nikon D40 DSLR is also supported. I was not able to find a good guide on interfacing the D40 to gphoto, so I wrote this down for reference.
Installing gphoto2
1. I have Fedora10 installed on my laptop. Running the following simple command “yum install gphoto2″ as root installs gphoto2.
2. Doing the above however does not install libghoto2 which is the core library designed to allow access to digital cameras by external programs.
Goto ghoto2.org and download the latest version of libgphoto2. The latest at my time of downloading was 2.4.5.
Extract all the contents on the Desktop in a libgphoto folder.
Open a terminal. As root, type “make”. If you encounter any errors, it maybe because libgphoto cannot find the packages it needs. I had to install libusb. Doing “yum install libusb” did it. If you are unable to successfully compile it, post in the comments, I’ll try to help.
Once compilation is done, type “make install” as root.
Close the terminal. Done!
Running gphoto2
1. Gphoto2 is now installed and ready to use. Make sure the camera is in PTP mode. Goto SETUP MENU -> USB and select MTP/PTP mode. Restart your camera.
2. You will see the following pop up. It is very important to click “Unmount.” If you do not, further instructions will not work.
3. To make sure your D40 was correctly detected by your PC, type ” dmesg | tail ” as root. You should see your camera detected in the last two – three lines.
4. Open another terminal and as user type the following: gphoto2 --list-ports
You should see the mode the camera is connected which is in PTP.
5. To see some more information about your camera, type the following in the same terminal: gphoto2 --summary
6. Now for capturing, type the following: gphoto2 --capture-image-and-download
This first saves the file “capt0000.jpg” on you camera in the “store_00010001″ folder. It then copies it to the current folder on your PC and deletes the one on the camera.
For taking shots at intervals, say 10 seconds in a custom folder, say “/home/D40/” try the following command. gphoto2 --capture-image-and-download --folder="/home/D40" --interval 10
If this guide was helpful or if you need any help, let me know in the comments below and remember to Subscribe
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.
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.
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
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….”
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.
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.
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.
Welcome to my place on the web. I note down anything interesting most of them relating to my experiences, Tech, To-dos, How-tos and various hacks. Most of my time is spent in tinkering around with hardware, building robots and working with DSPs.More
This hack is so impressive that I had to put it up here. I am really surprised that a dated piece of hardware[circa 1964] can still work with today’s technology.
