Challenge and Urgent Appeal --- EReaders Required

I wish someone would turn or hack a cheap $20 or $30 5 inch or 4 inch lcd digital photo frame into a ebook reader for text and rtf files.

I don't want wi-fi, bluetooth, internet access or making coffee costs pushing up the price.

A 4gb flash memory can store 10000 books easily.

Ideally it should have 4gb storage from a sdd card with a long battery life or the option to turn the backlight off.

A lcd displays don't consume much power this could extend the battery life.

Ebook readers like the amazon kindle and sony ereader cost as much as a laptop at present.

ebook readers cost from $300 to $800.

They are a rip off.

Manufacturers by keeping prices high are shooting themselves in the foot with poor sales.

What a rip off.

I mean $300 to $800 for a ebookreader.



I don't want to pay that much on principle.

Even a mini netbook is unsuitable for ebook reading due to the short battery life.

A low power low cost photoframe would be ideal.

I am surprised that no one has done this hack.

The focus in various forums seems to be turning photo frame into video displays for moving pictures which they are not really designed due to their poor frame rate.

They would are more suited to be ebook readers.

Anyone up for this challenge?

Who reads these days?

Us, here obviously, but it's a dying language... sad, but how many people do you know that consciously read for pleasure? I'm talking about a novel and not celebrity magazines here, even the sort of stuff you pick up in an airport I rarely see people reading these days.

I think it would be a great idea for ebook readers to be cheaper and i can't see there being much to recoup from r&d costs as (all) the tech has been with us for a while anyway, I guess it's more of a case of supply and demand at the moment. I think as well that a lot of people that read for pleasure - like myself - are probably still drawn toward the physicality of books, I like holding one, the smell etc.

Just install Adobe PDF for mobile phones and read the books on your phone instead. Install SD card for more GB's, easy and cheap and handy and you probably already have a mobile phone capable of this.

reply to post by ravenflt


Not Acceptable

tiny screen.Its no pleasure at all to read.

battery power used up very quickly.


I want to use 4 or 5 inch photoframe to be adapted.

Some photo frames can read text but no onboard storage or very limited..unable to switch of back light.unable to read in protrait mode.

also in some photoframes the text has to be turned into jpegs which is ridiculous.

back light be should be capable of being switched off..

Originally posted by beckybecky
reply to post by ravenflt

 

Not Acceptable

tiny screen.Its no pleasure at all to read.

Ah.. I misunderstood the idea, it sounded like you were electro-survivalist equipping yourself, and not luxary equipping

The main problem is that a lot of companies never release pinouts for their proprietary LCD screens or LCD driver microchips. It's all rather too complicated to try and figure out by trial and error, so most LCDs are of no use to the hacking crowd.

It really wouldn't be much of a problem to make one from the ground up for cheap, but I'd imagine that you'd run into problems with digital rights management and such.

An electronic photo frame just doesn't take any standard video feed. It's all some wierd custom interface with it's microcontroller, with no video in of any kind.

If you were really hardcore about it, but don't have godlike hardware hacking skills, you'd get ebooks in .pdf format, split them into their component images, and load those into a stock E-photo frame.

Originally posted by mdiinican
The main problem is that a lot of companies never release pinouts for their proprietary LCD screens or LCD driver microchips. It's all rather too complicated to try and figure out by trial and error, so most LCDs are of no use to the hacking crowd.

That's a false statement. The way industry works is they look for existing products and integrate them into their design.

If I were building a picture frame for commercial use, I wouldn't design my own controller or my own display. Atmel, Motorola, TI, Intel, etc already spend millions of man hours doing that for us. So I would just buy their hardware and program it myself - and yes, the datasheets are available, *the firmware is probably not*.

To hack a picture frame all you need to do is either modify existing firmware, or write your own code based on the datasheet info.

Here is a bunch of examples of hacked picture frames:
www.machinegrid.com...

Manufacturers by keeping prices high are shooting themselves in the foot with poor sales.

I will dare to say the hardware is not expensive at all, but supporting every known type of ebook and every language known to man becomes a problem and you can't just sell a solution like that for $50 or you won't be shooting yourself in the foot, but in the head.

Maybe you don't want to read chinese ebooks, or anything other than pdf files. But the industry is not going to create their products exclusively for you, but for everyone.

I mean $300 to $800 for a ebookreader

Try ebay. $100 to $300, even the fancy epaper ones. Still too much? Research MP5(smaller display, but higher demand = lower price). Not good enough? Become friends with a computer engineer, hack your* picture frame.

*even if you find a tutorial on hacking a picture frame to read, say, pdf files, the steps won't help you at all unless you have the exact same frame.



[edit on 26-9-2009 by daniel_g]

I think it would be a bit more easy to find a free mini netbook that has a dead battery and has a DC recharging jack. Then get an electronics guy to make a DC-DC converter and run it off an external battery. How much can the battery weigh and how long do you want it to last?

Maybe a small LCD store check out screen could be used. Turning the backlight off is easy as a switch if you can find someone good in electronics. I'm good in electonics, but its the distance thing and I'm no good with hacking software.