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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

#121

Post by Qwertious »

boringg wrote: post #66

Can someone explain to me what the obsession with e-ink is on hackernews? I understand that it has a lot of great qualities to it but it so far out of price range that it negates the upside. Or am I completely misreading the benefits?

e-ink has a cool and unique aesthetic that LCDs simply can't offer. It also, theoretically, can be permanently displaying information without being connected to the grid.

Neither of these two things are tradeoffs for price - a higher price can't get you an LCD that provides the e-ink aesthetic, and while you could buy a big solar/battery array for LCD, it'd be heavier/less portable and would be more expensive overall, anyway.

Also, the cost is basically zilch:

>For this project I went with a Nook Simple Touch Reader. You can find them on eBay or Facebook Marketplace for $10-$30 used.

$30 for a hobby project is nothing. You can spend more than that on wood.

Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album

#122

Post by dattiimo »

jgrahamc wrote: post #18

I've built a few things with eink displays and I strongly recommend NOT using simple picture frames (unless they fit perfectly). One way to get a really good looking result is a custom frame. There are tons of custom framing company that will cheaply make you a frame that fits the display with the appropriate cut out. https://blog.jgc.org/2023/05/a-better-case-for-my-inkplate-1...

A £3 custom mount board really makes a difference. I've built beautiful looking e-paper pictures using a basic IKEA frame and an custom cut mount from best4frames.

Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album

#123

Post by melagonster »

j1elo wrote: post #79

This made me think... it would be awesome to build for my parents a picture frame that could show family photos, and was integrated with an LLM, such that e.g. my mother could say "now I want to see a photo of us during last years's vacations in Italy" or where a given person appeared, or things like that. It would be quite a bit of work, though! Something to add to the pile of personal projects that never seems to p…

Maybe you can try the automated classifying function of iPhone?

Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album

#124

Post by saagarjha »

CharlesW wrote: post #96
afavour wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love for someone to prove me wrong here but I have a Google Home that I'd like to replace with an iPad. One thing it does beyond just showing pictures is brighten and dim the screen according to ambient light. When the lights are off it dims entirely into a night mode-like display that just shows the time. I've not seen an iOS app capable of the same (I'm not even sure if API access allows it?)

Excellent question. > I've not seen an iOS app capable of the same (I'm not even sure if API access allows it?) I don't believe apps can change system brightness settings themselves, but iOS does have an auto-brightness feature, and the app can additionally dim images or change what's displayed based on brightness or movement (using Camera access), time of day, and other signals.

They can, here’s the API to do so: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiscreen/161...

Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album

#125

Post by podviaznikov »

bandergirl wrote: post #116
podviaznikov wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I even have build a small product to show apple shared albums online https://public.photos/ also wanted to add API on top so that people can show photos however they want. But didn’t have a time to finish it yet.

That’s cool but why not fetch the photos via URL? Seems easier than having to maintain an email inbox

have more information that way I think on each photo.

Plus feels more robust.

Getting from the website might break if layout breaks.

Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album

#126

Post by acdha »

TwiztidK wrote: post #78
acdha wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The killer function for me would be a private shared folder so new pictures would automatically go to the grandparents. If the Aura software does that, I might have to replace the ones they have currently.

I have a Google Photos album (shared with a few close family members) that automatically adds photos of my daughter and syncs them with the Aura frames her grandparents have. We've had this setup for the last two years and it works really well. I think it's literally the use-case Aura is targeting.

I don’t use Google any more but it looks like they have the same functionality for iCloud. I’ll have to give that a try since it’d be perfect for our older relatives.

Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album

#127

Post by iamacyborg »

sho_hn wrote: post #59
jgrahamc wrote: post #18

I've built a few things with eink displays and I strongly recommend NOT using simple picture frames (unless they fit perfectly). One way to get a really good looking result is a custom frame. There are tons of custom framing company that will cheaply make you a frame that fits the display with the appropriate cut out. https://blog.jgc.org/2023/05/a-better-case-for-my-inkplate-1...

I did that for my Rust/LLM-based e-ink AI newspaper: https://imgur.com/a/NoTr8XX Custom frame by Halbe Rahmen, who I think make the most magnificent frames in the world, with the most loving team behind them. Not a shill; whenever I interact with the Halbe staff for anything I feel it.

> Custom frame by Halbe Rahmen, who I think make the most magnificent frames in the world, with the most loving team behind them. Not a shill; whenever I interact with the Halbe staff for anything I feel it.

Bold statement, what are they offering that's better than going into your typical framing store?

Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album

#128

Post by physicles »

WWLink wrote: post #120
Lord-Jobo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its actually damn near impossible to retrieve all of your photos/videos from icloud for a backup if you are using a windows machine to do so. It will constantly fail to sync fully, duplicate files, takes eons to download even on a fast connection, and there are bizarre file format conflicts with certain types of images. Very infuriating, and its been an issues for at least 5 years. 'Buy a mac if you want to actually…

TBH, the Photos app on Macs is just as bad at this. Especially if you have a LARGE album. I'll give you exactly the use case, and exactly why that is: I decided I didn't want to pay for the family 1tb icloud plan anymore because 90% of it was being used up by my brother taking silly pictures and videos all the time. So I had him get an external SSD and set him up with the Photos app to download to it. ~900gb of image…

Agreed on the dark patterns. I’m pretty adamant about staying on the free 5GB plan. So once a year or so my backup fails and I have to spend half an hour fighting with their intentionally terrible UI to reduce its size.

Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album

#129

Post by rob74 »

sho_hn wrote: post #59
jgrahamc wrote: post #18

I've built a few things with eink displays and I strongly recommend NOT using simple picture frames (unless they fit perfectly). One way to get a really good looking result is a custom frame. There are tons of custom framing company that will cheaply make you a frame that fits the display with the appropriate cut out. https://blog.jgc.org/2023/05/a-better-case-for-my-inkplate-1...

I did that for my Rust/LLM-based e-ink AI newspaper: https://imgur.com/a/NoTr8XX Custom frame by Halbe Rahmen, who I think make the most magnificent frames in the world, with the most loving team behind them. Not a shill; whenever I interact with the Halbe staff for anything I feel it.

Thanks for the pointer! I'm from Germany too, and been considering a similar project (using an old tablet) for a while now. This is another company however that would have been better off if the founder wouldn't have used their own name for it. My first thought was "why buy half a frame from these guys when I can get a whole frame elsewhere?"

Nice project BTW! However the coffee stain doesn't look very realistic in black-and-white...

Re: Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album

#130

Post by jdminhbg »

WWLink wrote: post #120
Lord-Jobo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its actually damn near impossible to retrieve all of your photos/videos from icloud for a backup if you are using a windows machine to do so. It will constantly fail to sync fully, duplicate files, takes eons to download even on a fast connection, and there are bizarre file format conflicts with certain types of images. Very infuriating, and its been an issues for at least 5 years. 'Buy a mac if you want to actually…

TBH, the Photos app on Macs is just as bad at this. Especially if you have a LARGE album. I'll give you exactly the use case, and exactly why that is: I decided I didn't want to pay for the family 1tb icloud plan anymore because 90% of it was being used up by my brother taking silly pictures and videos all the time. So I had him get an external SSD and set him up with the Photos app to download to it. ~900gb of image…

> I think they do that on purpose to discourage people from quitting icloud.

I think they just haven't updated the CPU/bandwidth-saving provisions that have been in the products for years. The same issues happen if you are staying on iCloud and syncing to new devices. I know that I have a gigabit ethernet connection to a machine that is not doing anything else, but the app doesn't have a way to tell it that.

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