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.

Check the video below:

Info via[Hackaday]

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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

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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-[Waiting to be updated]
• 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.

Related posts:

1. Hacking the Hannah Montana Photocube – Almost!
2. Taking Apart the Spy Video ATV-360

The HUD consists of a frame which sits in the same way as you would wear a pair of spectacles. On the right side, a case is attached which holds all the necessary electronics and optics. The HUD receives video signals from the remote which houses the camera receiver.

1. First for a few views. Click on the views for a larger image.

2. So that you know how it looks, I setup two scenes. One with a PostIt note saying “HI” and the other a Rubik’s cube. The LCD is monocohrome however, so the image you will see is not color.

• The one with the PostIt note
  
• The one with the Rubiks cube
  

3. Opening is not that easy as there are no screws to take apart the top cover which says “Spy Gear”. The cover is glued to the case using glue. Taking a clue from Jake to avoid inserting the screwdriver on the side the “cable does not come out”, I managed to take it apart. Pry the side where the black cable comes out. The other side has the LCD connector, you might damage it if ou pry that side. It’s tough at first, but once you get one side, it gets easier.

4. Once the cover is removed, the PCB becomes visible. The main controller chip is a Kopin KCD-A300-QB. All the other parts are support components for the chip. There is a small potentiometer in one corner which allows you to change camera gain. You can see the display change in brightness when you change it. Try adjusting it, there is no harm in doing so as it can easily be bough back to it’s previous value by looking at the screen.

5. Remove the two screws keeping the PCB in place. Also it’s time to remove the LCD connector. To remove it, pull the black tab out a bit as in the pic.
The connector will slip out easily with a slight tug. The connector is pretty rugged. I have already plugged it in/out a few times.

6.The LCD connector is glued on to the casing. Remember to break it free before going ahead.

6: Four more screws need to be taken out to remove the eyepiece. Use a pair of pliers to do this.

7.Before I forget, the PCB has a high output smd LED behind it as below:

8. Prying out gives you the lens casing. It’s pretty well made, with the LCD nicely sitting in it’s place. It was designed so that the lens was at a fixed distance from the LCD.

9.Going further, pry the top half with a flat head screwdriver. There are four tiny rods which keep it inline. This part should come out easily.

9.Now for the LCD. The LCD is in a tiny casing which sits in a grooved box. There is a slight amount of glue on one end as in the image. With a flat head screwdriver, as shown, just give a tiny nudge and it should come free.

10. The LCD in all it’s glory!

11. The following views show the three pieces of the lens casing. Note that the part at the extreme right of each image has a diffused screen to spread light from the SMD LED.

12. This was as far as I could go. The eyepiece is glued together. Trying to take it apart would mean risk in breaking the lens.

Parts and Notes:
Main controller chip :: Kopin KCD-A300-QB
Documents :: kopin_kcd-a300-qb_dsiplay_driver
Notes :: This is the driver chip for the 300M LV monochrome display. It is designed to accept a standard monochrome video signal (525 or 625 lines), and convert it for the display. Unfortunately its a monochrome driver and not a color one.

LCD Display :: Kopin 300MLV CyberDisplay
Documents :: kopin_cyberdisplay_300m_lv_feature_sheet
Notes :: This is the LCD Display with the connector. The feature sheet shows a frameless one, but I’m unable to find the document with the framed one.

If you find this interesting or have some new ideas or links, please post it in the comments. Thanks for reading and don’t forget to Subscribe [email] for more followups and hacks.

Related posts:

1. Taking Apart the Spy Video ATV-360

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.

Related posts:

1. Digital Picture Frame Hacking Roundup

1. Various views of the vehicle.

2. Remove all the screws from the bottom of the vehicle, including the tracks.

3.Remove the top shell slowly. Don’t pull on it. You will need to disconnect the camera, antenna and mic headers to get it free.

4. Once the top shell is free, the circuit board and the drive system is visible. There is a bank of FETs for the motors. The board is very well labeled.

5. To take apart the drive system, loosen the screws around the orange box. Then unscrew the black tab keeping the wires from the orange box secure.

6.Taking apart the wheel hub is a chore, but possible with pliers, a small glass jar, some flame and some strength.First, remove the stopper from the shaft. Use pliers and strength:

Remove the large gear and everything between the gear and the stopper. Now again using pliers, remove the torque check gear:

Remove all the stuff after that including the orange cap with the three screws. Once the orange cap is removed, the black cover on the other end of the wheel can be removed:

Now for the interesting part. The wheel hub is dead set into the shaft and we need to remove it. Make sure you have a small jar, like below, ready. Choose one such that it’s mouth is small enough only for the shaft to go in. Ignore the gears on the shaft in the picture. You should be having just a blank shaft with the black hub and orange cap on.

Make sure you have the orange cap on. Now heat the shaft with a flame for around 30 seconds. This is just to soften the hub’s hold on the shaft. Holding it over the flame too long is going to melt the plastic.

Now while the shaft is still hot, place the shaft as shown below and hammer the other end down.

The shaft should come out after a few bangs. The wheel is now disassembled:

7. Why all this? I can now use a hub adapter and attach the ATV’s stock hub to a better motor.
The following hub adapter is from Lynxmotion. I will need to drill new holes to match the adapter.

If you are interested, check out your local Target store or you could try Amazon:

Thanks for looking. Any questions, ask in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Just got my Spy Gear Spy Video ATV-360
2. Taking Apart the ATV-360 EyePiece [Head Mounted Display]
3. Digital Picture Frame Hacking Roundup

The ATV comes with the following features:

• -A skid steer design for easy maneuverability.
• -A wireless monochrome camera.
• -A wireless controller with a nice 360 degree turn feature.
• -A headset which receives a real time video feed from the vehicle as well as audio.

The build quality of the tracks is very good and looks like they can take a beating before they start wearing out. I haven’t checked range yet since I’m going to rip out the internals anyway.

The toy is a good filler for your electronics parts bin. Of special interest is the ATV’s head unit. It comes with a very hackable circuit board. Jake from JackOfAllTrades posted a detailed writeup on the board.

I’ll post when I’m done tearing it apart :).
If you are interested, check out your local Target store or you could try Amazon:

Related posts:

1. Taking Apart the Spy Video ATV-360

Anyway, in case you were linked here from other sites to certain parts of the old site, you may find new links below.
I put up the few informative pages which used to receive a lot of traffic, the remaining will be up as soon as I get some time.

• -Serial Parser using a State Machine
• -ADXL202 Accelerometer Soldering Tutorial
• -Programming the Surveyor SRV-1 with the LPC2000 Flash Utility
• -PIC 16F84A Temperature Controller
• -Parallel Port Tutorial – Part 1
• -Parallel Port Tutorial – Part 2

If you are unable to find the links/pages you need, post a comment below.
And thanks for visiting!

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The example illustrated here is to parse direction,steering angle and speed sent from a PC to a microcontroller, in this case a Microchip PIC16F876A. Parsing in this example is based on the idea of a state machine. If you need to know more about state machines, the following link may be helpful:
Microchip forums : Most efficient way to “decode” serial data?
Most of the code used here is based on feature article by Glen Worstell on a “Ham Radio Repeater Locator” using a Garmin GPSMAP 295.
Links : Here
code : Here (ftp).

In this example, my PC transmits a serial string “$122133200″ where :
$ : Start of String(SOS)
122: Direction(Note 1)
133: Steering Angle
200: Speed

In my microcontroller the incoming string is compared byte by byte with a parser string “$dddtttsss” using a state machine where :
$ : Start of String(SOS)
ddd: Direction
ttt: Steering Angle
sss: Speed
The State Machine:

State 0: The state machine does nothing until a “$” or Start of String(SOS) is received.
State 1: “$” received.If not goto State 0.
State 2: The parser knows that the next(second) byte coming in has to be a Direction parameter, because of the “d” in the parser string If a number comes in, it is stored. If anyhing anything other than a number is received, it is discarded and the machine returns to State 0. This continues for 2 more bytes.
State 3: The fifth byte is the steering angle, represented by a “t” in the parser string.Ths same for the sixth and seventh bytes. State 4: The eighth byte is the Speed, known by the “s” in the parser.

The state machine is reset or restarted after the tenth byte.
If you declare the direction,steering angle and Speed as an int8 or a char, the final value for each parameter would be :
for direction:
direction = direction * 10 + received byte.

Direction = 0*10 + 1 = 1
Direction = 1*10 + 2 = 12
Direction = 12*10 + 2= 122

The following source code is for the Micrchip PIC16F876A, written in CCS.
Code : Here

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However there’s this problem, I usually work on PDIP packages and SMDs do give me a scare,not because I’ve never soldered them,but because I do not have the necessary equipment for it. So I decide to do my thing , and also take a little inspiration from Sparkfun’s Breakout board.

My first step was to find a thinner tip for the soldering iron. It presently has a standard tip,too big to solder the accelerometer. I decide to go shopping for a thinner one and get the finest one available at my local shop.
This is what the tip looks like[It's standard, I need a thinner one]

This is the new tip.

Since I needed to get wires out from the ADXL202 , I used very thin ones.You can easy get these by removing the insulation off normal wires you use in breadboarding. Now comes the difficult part – soldering.

First you need to hold your chip in place.With a little tape,firmly place the accelerometer on the table your working on.

This will prevent the chip from moving around ,when you solder the wires

First, put a little solder on one of the accelerometer’s solder points.Then taking a wire ,heat the wire, add some solder and touch it to the sensor’s pads. Do the same for the other seven “pins” of the sensor This is how it looked when done.[I know it's gory and ugly,but it's the best I could do]

Here’s the top view.

Now to mount the sensor onto a PCB. I chose a simple general purpose PCB[ dot matrix], as it’s easy available.That’s a One Ruppee coin,Indian currency ,the board is next to.

I cut the PCB to half to get a smaller footprint,that will house the ADXL202 and the supporting components. This is the finished version of the board:

If you notice,there are pins at the bottom of the board.These are for the signal and supply lines.I put them ,so that the board can piggy back on a bigger PCB housing the microcontroller…I also put a berg connector on the top,so that I could debug the signals. Following scope traces show the PWM changing as the accelerometer is tilted.

Tilted to one side:

Sensor on level surface:

Tilted to the other side:

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