Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album
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Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album
#2This is really neat! I have a receipt printer I’ve been meaning to do something cool with—I think it can even handle images.
Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album
#3> I bought this pack of 8x10 frames off Amazon
Thrift stores (in the U.S.) are gold mines for picture frames. And they probably cost you only a few bucks.
Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album
#4I built something similar with raspberry pi zero 2 w. Instead of showing icloud album, I fetch a paper-edition newspaper frontpage using headless chrome and display it. The display is made by waveshare, quite on the pricy side.
Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album
#5> iCloud photo albums have no API. However, if you share an iCloud photo album to a public link, you can use the Developer Tools to inspect the API requests Apple is making to get the photos.
That's clever. I tried something similar to get shared Calendar (Apple) events for the eInk project I put together. I wish there were a better, less hackish API I could have called.
Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album
#6Very neat! Did a similar project with AI generated images. Fun for days with this kind of cheap hardware!
Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album
#7I’m mildly surprised that this isn’t an official product. I have half a dozen relatives I’d give “AirFrames” to if Apple made them or let a third party do it, especially if they had decent handling of Live Photos.
Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album
#8> iCloud photo albums have no API. However, if you share an iCloud photo album to a public link, you can use the Developer Tools to inspect the API requests Apple is making to get the photos. That's clever. I tried something similar to get shared Calendar (Apple) events for the eInk project I put together. I wish there were a better, less hackish API I could have called.
Apple Calendar server uses CalDAV. If you could see the data after authenticating it should be quite parse-able. You could also share your iCloud calendar with an account that is logged in on hardware you own like an old Mac, and use the EventKit framework to send copies of the data to whatever custom server you wanted.
Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album
#9This is really cool! I love pet projects like this. Although, I can't help but wonder why OP didn't put a frame around an ancient Fire tablet or something else with an LCD screen and web browsing out of the box.
Seems like it would result in a better experience (color) with much less work and about the same price point.
Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album
#10This is really cool! I love pet projects like this. Although, I can't help but wonder why OP didn't put a frame around an ancient Fire tablet or something else with an LCD screen and web browsing out of the box. Seems like it would result in a better experience (color) with much less work and about the same price point.
Colour e-ink displays exist. We don't live in spaceships yet but this is just as good.