Hacktastico!

Unlike the majority of picture frame hacks on the internet, this guide from Hack A Day teaches users how to build and program a digital picture frame from scratch. This is a great tutorial because it not only teaches the reader how to build the frame, but also teaches some useful functions like reading from SD cards, PIC programming, and working with common graphical LCDs.

“We set out to build a 100% DIY, scratch-built digital picture frame. Our frame has a 12bit color LCD, gigabytes of storage on common, FAT-formatted microSD cards, and you can build it at home.”

This project presents bit-twiddling and PIC programming in a more accessible fashion than many other tutorials on the net with a great end result.

Additional fun with digital pictures frames can be found here.

This is the beginning of a hopefully reoccurring segment called Found Hacks, where I bring up some cool hacks and mods I’ve found on other websites.

Today’s Found Hack is from spritemods.com [via HackedGadgets]. It presents step-by-step instructions on making a hardware dongle that attaches to an HP printer and changes what the display reads.

“A nice thing about the HP laserjets is that they have a little display, and you can use PJL, a sort of controlling language, to change what’s displayed on it, using a bit of code that runs on a PC.

For the microcontroller itself, I decided on my good old pal the ATTiny2313. I could have used an other avr, but I’ve got dozens of this type laying around and theyre cheap enough, so I decided on this one.”

This is a really cool hack and I can’t wait to try it out.

Also: There is a software hack to do this sort of thing over a network. It’s a little less safe because you could mess things up pretty bad.