Greater than another class of machine, we’ve got book readers to thank for the event and acceptance of ePaper/E Ink show expertise. Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite and the NOOK collection from Barnes & Noble proved to be the right utility for ePaper, because the low vitality consumption and excessive distinction have been fascinating and the sluggish refresh fee was straightforward to disregard. However outdated book gadgets have little or no worth as soon as readers improve to newer fashions. Ben Borgers took benefit of that reality to purchase some cheap outdated NOOK book readers to flip into iCloud photograph album frames as items.
Photographs look surprisingly good on ePaper screens when you’ve got the suitable expectations. Most fashions can solely show in grayscale, so that you gained’t be getting the sorts of full-color pictures that you can with LCD or OLED expertise. However the unbelievable distinction of ePaper makes it a sensible choice for black-and-white pictures. Most digital photograph frames appear like laptop screens, however this challenge makes it appear like printed pictures have been positioned in regular frames.
This was all attainable as a result of NOOK gadgets run an Android-based working system. After gaining root entry, Borgers was in a position to customise the working system and set up apps identical to if the NOOK have been an outdated smartphone. That allow him make the most of an outdated app known as Electrical Signal, which is a fundamental kiosk program that shows any web site and refreshes the web page at set intervals. Any photograph on the web site would due to this fact present up on the ePaper display screen — Borgers simply needed to set the scale to match the NOOK’s decision.
Borgers constructed two of those gadgets as items for his girlfriend and his dad and mom, and he needed them to be as straightforward to make use of as attainable. They’re iPhone customers, so he thought probably the most intuitive strategy could be to point out footage from a shared iCloud album.
Borgers wanted to get pictures from a selected publicly shared iCloud album to his web site, however Apple doesn’t present an iCloud API (Utility 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 footage. 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 gadgets into photograph frames. The frames’ backs bulged a bit, however this seems to be good sufficient and was a easy resolution. Now the recipients can simply show their favourite pictures in black-and-white ePaper glory.