Greater than every other class of machine, we’ve got e-book readers to thank for the event and acceptance of ePaper/E Ink show expertise. Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite and the NOOK sequence from Barnes & Noble proved to be the right utility for ePaper, because the low power consumption and excessive distinction had been fascinating and the sluggish refresh fee was simple to disregard. However previous e-book units have little or no worth as soon as readers improve to newer fashions. Ben Borgers took benefit of that truth to purchase some cheap previous NOOK e-book readers to flip into iCloud picture album frames as presents.
Images look surprisingly good on ePaper screens if in case you have the proper expectations. Most fashions can solely show in grayscale, so that you received’t be getting the sorts of full-color photographs that you would with LCD or OLED expertise. However the unbelievable distinction of ePaper makes it a sensible choice for black-and-white photographs. Most digital picture frames appear to be pc screens, however this venture makes it appear to be printed photographs had been positioned in regular frames.
This was all doable as a result of NOOK units run an Android-based working system. After gaining root entry, Borgers was capable of customise the working system and set up apps similar to if the NOOK had been an previous smartphone. That allow him make the most of an previous app referred to as Electrical Signal, which is a fundamental kiosk program that shows any web site and refreshes the web page at set intervals. Any picture on the web site would subsequently present up on the ePaper display — Borgers simply needed to set the scale to match the NOOK’s decision.
Borgers constructed two of those units as presents for his girlfriend and his mother and father, and he wished them to be as simple to make use of as doable. They’re iPhone customers, so he thought essentially the most intuitive strategy could be to point out photos from a shared iCloud album.
Borgers wanted to get photographs from a selected publicly shared iCloud album to his web site, however Apple doesn’t present an iCloud API (Software Programming Interface) for conditions like this. His resolution was to smell out the backend API requests and have the web site server replicate these to fetch new photos. As a result of that is “unofficial” and doesn’t use any iCloud credentials, it solely works with albums made public and shared with a hyperlink.
With software program sorted out, Borgers merely crammed the NOOK units into picture frames. The frames’ backs bulged a bit, however this seems good sufficient and was a easy resolution. Now the recipients can simply show their favourite photographs in black-and-white ePaper glory.
