Working Around "Closed" Framechannel Devices

I got a nice WiFi digital picture frame (Motorola LS1000WB) for my Grandma so that she can keep tabs on the family. It was really handy since it could power on directly in to a state where it fetched pictures from a service called Framechannel. However, the economy evidently got the best of them and Framechannel shut down. The frame now powers on to a nice configuration screen (not very grandma-friendly). It's also closed-source and not very hackable.

However, some intrepid folks have dug up a certification checklist and documented the XML format that the device uses.

The hardest part in all of this is getting a hold of "rss.framechannel.com". You need to trick the frame in to going to a site your control instead of the defunct framechannel one. If you have an OpenWRT or DD-WRT this is fairly simple. You just put an entry in your router's /etc/hosts that says something like:

192.168.22.33 rss.framechannel.com

where 192.168.22.33 is the IP of your web server. You can do this with bind, but it's a bit more involved. After you get this part working, you need some pictures in to Framechannel's XML format. I use this script to fetch a Picasa feed and put it in Framechannel's format. Lastly, you need a webserver which can serve the XML back out. In my case, I needed a path like this:

/productId=MOT001/frameId=00FD53221ABC/language=en/firmware=20090721

I did it with this simple script:

DIR=/var/www/productId=MOT001/frameId=00FD53221ABC/language=en/
mkdir -p "$DIR"
perl picasa-to-framechannel-rss.pl [your RSS feed here] > "$DIR/firmware=20090721"

Note: if you are going to do this, remember that this makes your pictures publicly accessible. You should at least set your web server to not let folks get directory indexes on "/productId=MOT001". But, they can still guess your frameId pretty easily.

Despite the frame itself being closed, the openness of apache, bind/dnsmasq and the XML format it uses allowed the frame to be resurrected from doorstop status to a fully-working frame again.