Openschemes

Welcome back folks,

Well if you’ve read in our First and Second Articles on the cheap little 1.5″ digital photo frames, we’ve started some hacking attempts.  So far, we’ve lucked upon the Vendor’s official SDK, which consists of the source code for the whole damn device! plus some miscellaneous tools that will help in development.

Long story short, their firm built fine for us with some makefile cleanup – those issues may, of course,  be due to our own incompetence.  But if it doesn’t build for you first time, you might as well read about our trials and tribulations in hopes of getting you up to speed a little quicker.  Please note that none of the generic LCD libs included in the vendor . . . → Read More: Exploring the AX206 Official Firmware SDK

Hello Schemers,

Last spring, hax0ring keychain-style digital photo frames was all the rage.  Although we did buy a couple and pulled them apart, there was just too much other stuff going on to really get on the bandwagon at the time.  Boo on us!

But upon finding this little COBY DPF-151 sitting in a junk bin, it yelled out “hack me, dammit!” in it’s tiny plastic-toy voice.  And who can resist something like that?

The dust was blown off and the innards were peeked at.  USB was plugged and unplugged and yep – it was alive and screaming “target”!  And with a little luck, we happened upon the full datasheet, development guide, and SDK.   Legally!  We’ll give out the goods later in the article.

Fig 1 – The Target: The Coby (AX206-Based) Digital Photo Frame

Please be warned that everything good may have already been done to this device – who knows!  The masters who made the first inroads into the field have paved a wide and feature-rich trail.  We’ll first start with a little history and summary of what’s been done so far, and then – try to figure out if there’s anything cool left to do!

History

It seems that it all started with a keychain photoframe based on the Sitronix ST2205 CPU.  In an incredibly clever feat, Spritesmods found that the PC photo transfer program acted as a master for blindly reading and writing the internal flash.  By impersonating it’s comms, it was possible to dump out the firmware residing in low flash and then things really took off – Their project to  Use a DPF as a second display generated a ton of interest and the pace began to pick up.

Around that time, people started finding that their DPF’s were coming with a different chip, the Appotech AX206.  It’s another 8051-cored System-On-Chip (SOC), which simply means that the LCD controller, memory controller, etc, are all assembled together on one chip.  So plop that one chip down, add your flash and LCD and you have a DPF.  Neat!  Or throw away the crappy firmware and write your own, and you have a tiny 8051 system with a built in LCD.  Even neater!

As far as we can tell, Section 5′s articles on the AX206 were the first reported hacks of this new generation of DPF.  Kudos!  Their direction is in use of the device as a second display for a PC, or as a very low cost display for devices like the DockStar, which can be hacked for use as a Linux server but comes with no display.   Read the epic dev thread LCD screen for your dockstar (cheap! <$5) at Doozan concerning lcd4linux and the DPF’s..

Nowadays, the best general-purpose compendium of knowledge on the internal details of these devices is probably at Spriteserver.nl.  Read up and absorb knowledge, schemers.  You will need it as we dive deeper into this device on Page 2.