Sunday, September 8, 2013

Kindle digital photo frame part 1

Weeks ago I found out that my girlfriend would look at our pictures to relax herself when she is bored/stressed. I had the idea of putting a digital photo frame at her desk at work, that would cycle through our photos on a regular basis. She would be so delighted.

So I went to search for some digital photo frames on Qoo10.sg. Lots of choices, but there's a major problem. They're all using LED/LCD screens. This means: either they have an annoyingly short battery life (this item - 4 to 5 hours only?! Seriously?) or AC adaptor cables. I want a frame that is portable, not entangled by wires, and have a battery life counted in weeks, not hours.

So, the Kindle suits my purposes well. It does not consume power when displaying pictures, only when changing them. Suppose I change the images only once per hour... how much power can I save? The Kindle will last weeks!

I was lucky enough to find a seller on Hardwarezone selling his old Kindle keyboard WiFi at $70. He posted his offer just 3 hours before I saw it. And, coincidentally, he was visiting my office on the next day. I don't even need to arrange a pickup point! ^^

The next part: hacking the kindle. I followed a series of guides:

  1. http://anoved.net/2012/02/custom-kindle-screensaver-images-with-kite/ to enable custom screensavers.
  2. http://speely.wordpress.com/tag/3-4/ to enable ssh, and used this to figure out the root password
More to come!

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