Let’s build a Digital Picture Frame (again)…

I’ve posted some articles in the past about making Digital Picture Frame operating system images. Kurt Kennett (BSP developer in the Windows CE team) recently found an old digital picture frame (made by PhotoLoom) in our hardware lab. The device powered up but didn’t have a Compact Flash card to boot any o/s image. So Kurt decided to work on a side project to get the picture frame up and running.

The frame is based on x86 processor and boots using the CEPC BSP (with RTL8139/NE2000 drivers included) – the digital picture frame has both wired and wireless connections, first step is to get the wired connection up and running.

The frame doesn’t have any inputs (it does have touch screen but we’ve not figured out what the hardware is yet), so we’re going with no inputs. If we boot the frame how do we setup the internet proxy address (if we’re on the corporate network), or the picture feed (I decided to use https://frameit.live.com) ? – We decided to use Telnet (CE 6 ships with a telnet server), we could have the picture frame application get the frames IP address and display this to the user. The user then uses an appropriate telnet client to get to the frame and run some console applications to setup the proxy server (optional) and the frame feed.

There’s a number of things to walk through to get the frame running, look out for some blog posts, and perhaps some videos that explain the steps.

- Mike