Digital Picture Frame Touch Screen

[Michael McSharry]

Kodak has recently come out with a 10" WiFi digital picture frame that contains 12 touch points on the bezel. One of the the interfaces it supports is an RSS feed. Costco online is selling them for $200 for another 10 days http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product...=1&topnav=&s=1

I picked one up for evaluation and in general it looks to be a nice product. I really have no experience with RSS feeds, but I would like to try to do a simple one just to try proof of concept. The frame comes with some sites already setup for evaluation such flickr and some weather and news ones as well. Are there any simple examples available where HS could serve as a RSS feed source that I may be able to tweak to be the source for the picture frame?

I have not looked yet for a SDK to see if there is some way to make use of the bezel touch points beyond what is built into the frame's firmware, but it would be nice if their activation was available via the WiFi.

[stipus]

That would be nice if a SDK was available for this device.

We could build a cool HS plugin

[rmasonjr]

Are there any simple examples available where HS could serve as a RSS feed source that I may be able to tweak to be the source for the picture frame?

I use the HS message board's RSS feed to display new messages in the Google Toolbar on my desktop. It works great.

See if the frame can access: http://board.homeseer.com/external.php?type=RSS2

As for as HS itself serving an RSS feed source - that is an interesting idea. The thought of my devices turning on/off and me getting notification via Google Toolbar of any other RSS reader is pretty neat.

[jon00]

Michael,

A friend of mine has the Kodak 8" version of your's and it is very good.

I would say it would be easy to write a RSS feed generator in VB.NET (similar to XML files), however I do not know if anyone has done this.

You may be interested in a script I wrote especially for updating picture frames by building an image file. You can include HS information in the designs if you want. More info can be found here

[Michael McSharry]

rmasonj, I did not try a generic RSS URL as you referenced as I believe the frame will only be looking for images and not text.

Jon00, your download does look to be very useful in an application such as this. I need to get to first base as the first step in hitting the homerun.

Am I correct that a RSS Reader/Frame will poll the RSS Feeds that are in its list at some interval and look for the publish date keyword in the XML and if newer than the last time will display the new content?

A single RSS feed site may have more than one piece of information at any given time. Do the pieces of information effectively get appended and then at some time the old information rolls off the list? Perhaps starting a fresh list after 24 hours or at the start of a day.

For the HA application of the frame would need to be an understanding of the polling rate of the RSS feed. If it is seconds than a reasonable real time feedback system could result. If it is every 15 minutes then this become more a a log or historical display rather than a real time one.

I noticed that with the same RSS feeds that came with the Kodak frame that the Weather one showed a steady image while most others such as news showed a rotating slideshow of the current news. Could it be that the weather RSS feed only has one piece of data so the image does not rotate, but the others have multiple so the frame rotates among each. This actually could be very useful for HA applications as I know I found this to be useful with my implementation of Main Lobby where my current information screens operated in this manner. Jon did mention that a 2 image buffer was needed fore his frame before the image was rendered. While this is likely not a problem, I suspect with an RSS source it will not be necessary.

Is my RSS concept-of-operation correct?
Does anyone have an idea of typical polling rates for RSS readers and specifically what sould be expected for the frame?

[jon00]

Michael,

There are several variants of RSS feeds and the updating and size is purely dependant on the provider. I would suggest you look at the Wiki on this subject.

That said, I believe most wireless picture frame manufacturers including Kodak use Framechannel which automatically convert RSS feeds to images so that they can be viewed on the screen. Here are the facts:

FrameChannel is a customisable web services platform to manage the intelligent delivery of personalised content to wireless digital picture frames and other information appliances.

FrameChannel offers a library of hundreds of channels of content, all optimised for viewing on wireless picture frames. These include text based channels that are converted to images such as news headlines, live weather forecasts, sports scores, and horoscopes as well as image content from sources like National Geographic, AP Images and other galleries shot by the top photographers from around the world.

This content is then married with each user's personal photos that can be uploaded to FrameChannel or pulled from a variety of supported photo sharing sites including Flickr, Picasa, Webshots, Facebook and others. Each user selects the channels that interest them, sets the rules for each channel and FrameChannel applies its rules engine to create a unique content stream for each user that is updated continually.

I'm not sure if this is useful in interfacing with HS (my frame also supports Framechannel) hence the route I took.

[Michael McSharry]

I did setup a weather frame from FrameChannel and they made 25% of the image an advertisement and then every 4th weather page was a full page advertisement for FrameChannel. I infer from your response that you are using it in a manner that does not carry the advertisements. Is this so?

I did find out from Kodak that the frame is expecting Media RSS 2.0.

I also got ahold of somebody at Kodak that actually understood my questions about using the frame as part of an HA environment. He was part of the R&D team. His initial indication is that the SDK is not available because of the competitive nature of the frame marketplace, but he was going to check with his management anyway. We should find out next week.

[jon00]

Michael,

I'm not using FrameChannel at all; just my own script. I just design my own pages to display when I want them to change locally. I cannot see any value going down the RSS route IMHO, however I respect that RSS may be your choice.

The image below is generated entirely by my script including the background, boxes, borders, text etc. The weather image is imported from the web. The actual information shown is derived by using defined variables (time, date etc) and the other information from Homeseer including devicestrings & ini files. If you have a virtual device with an image, it can show that too!

In essence it can display virtually any data that Homeseer provides (with limitations).

I would be really interested if you do obtain the SDK as the use of the 12 touch buttons would open up many possibilities.

[Michael McSharry]

I have all my media on a NAS and Kodak told me that the frame cannot be setup to use a location that does not have its EasyShare software installed. What I wanted to do was provide an RSS "pointer" to my picture media rather than copying the files to another computer and then deleting the file after it had been displayed. With the RSS server under HA control then I could prioritize picture vs. information that is generated locally. This would give me the abilty to use a UI other than the frame's bezel should the bezel event not be available via WiFi.

I assume your HA server also contains your picture library or you do not use a picture library. I also have the problem that EasyShare does not work with W2K and that is what runs HS so even if I wanted to copy the file I would not be able to because of the OS restriction. My HA server is a Dell server and I had to jump through hoops to get W2K installed on it as Dell only supported Server 2003 or a Unix server on that hardware. I do not want to disturb my stable platform so W2K is staying.

It is turning out that this R-Simple-S is not turning out to be that simple or I am missing some key aspect. I have taken MRSS examples I have found on the web and served them via HS and have had no luck with either Miro or the frame as the client. The format is recognized as the texual part of the xml is shown in Miro, but the image part is not rendered and Miro indicates that there is no content. I have experimented with variants of the xml using the MRSS spec and other examples, but no luck. I did observe one MRSS site has Content-encoding as gzip, with content-type of text/html. What I have read is the HS-provided content-type of application/xml is preferred, but no encoding is done by HS.

I wil let everyone know when I get the word about the SDK.

[jon00]

OK, I understand where you are coming from now.

My frame is served from another PC on my network and all I do is use a small bit of VB.NET scripting to copy 2 images across from my HS server to a folder on the other PC using UNC paths. I do not use it to display other pictures however, I expect just a rename of folders remotely would work just fine.

If you display your locally generated RSS feeds in IE7 or 8, do they show the images?

[Michael McSharry]

If I use IE to open the files it acts as an editor. If I serve then via HS then I get the text, but not the image in IE. When I make my own server the frame gives an error, while IE behaves the same as with HS as the server.