Using a Digital Photo Frame as a LCD system display

[dancingmatt]

Happy New Year all!

I got a Digital Photo Frame for Christmas, a very nice one from Toshiba. It takes all sorts of cards and a USB connection.

It occured to me - for ages now people have been selling LCD or VFD displays as little system readouts, showing things like CPU temp, fan speeds, media playing information, news feeds etc. Things like this :::SoundGraph::: Innovation of Human on Digital Network or techPowerUp! Review :: Soundgraph iMON VFD :: Page 1 / 6

They've always been £50 or so for 2 line monochrome LCD displays. For £50 you can now get digital photo frames, many of which are a bit rubbish, but nevertheless have something like 720x480 resolution in colour.

So, thinkers/hackers/coders... could it be possible to use my digital photo frame like the old 2 line LCD displays? Even if it was only monochrome, just text, whatever? It won't work as a straight forward monitor because it attaches over USB, but so do the LCD displays...

All thoughts, ideas, free programs or excellent Google searches turning up results that I haven't found, very welcome!

DM

[Funkstar]

They are quite different though.

Photo frames appear as mass storage devices over USB so you can upload photos to it. External displays like you mentioned are actually serial output devices with display micro controllers you can send arbitrary data to over the USB connection (it pretends to be a serial device over USB)

Depending on how embeded these things are, it might be possible to change the software on the photo frame. For example if they were a general purpose processor running linux, there may be a way to change the software on the device, but i wouldn't be too hopefull. And it isn't going to be easy to do.

[circuitmonkey]

if it where possible to make your computer behave like a usb storage device (not sure how feasible this is) you could have your computer generate a image with the data you want displayed included. this would then be updated depending on the refresh rate of your display. as long as its not absolute time critical information this should work very nicely