I’ve got a Ceiva digital photo frame… I take pictures, upload them to the Ceiva site, and then my frame downloads them via a wifi connection. This service costs an exorbitant $120/year!
Now I’d happily pay $40/year or so, but Ceiva would rather charge customers way too much and have fewer of us than set a reasonable price point and increase their satisfied customer base.
So, I want to hack my frame. I’m sure they won’t like it, but too bad. I bought it, I own it, I can do what I want with it. Problem is I have no idea what I’m doing in regards to hacking.
What I’d like to do is have the unit connect to my wifi (which it does) so that I can directly send photos from my computer to the frame, bypassing the ceiva service. Yes, I can do it with a flash drive, but I’ve got the wireless adaptor and that’s the whole point of the thing.
Is there any way to hack the frame so that it’s “just another drive” on my network, which can be accessed via wifi?
PS - I know there are Linux hacks out there. I don’t have Linux, I’ve got a Mac and can run Windows on it, but I’m hoping the wifi aspect lets me skip the whole importance of the source computer anyway.
Yeah that’s the port I found, but as it stands I can use a flash drive and manually transfer pics over already. I know that’s a viable option, but I’m trying to skip that and just use wifi. It’s the whole reason wifi exists, to not have to physically connect all your networked devices. Is that the only option out there? It’s all I could find as well.
Can’t really return it. It was donated to a school and I purchased it from them via a silent auction. Came with a free year of service which has been great. I really like what Ceiva does. I just despise their price point.
If you had the time, you could record the WiFi traffic and see what the frame was doing, then duplicate it on your local server. The fact that you can upload photos via a serial port indicates that they aren’t doing anything very sophisticated, but you are still going to need to reverse engineer it.
Note that there is nothing “Linux” about the serial port hack - the hacker is just using Linux software to format the photos.
I wonder if the software works on cygwin (a free unix environment that runs on windows). Perhaps the developers have tried it. Im sure if you emailed them they would tell you.
I was thinking either it’s connecting to a hard coded IP address or it’s looking up by name. If you ran your own DNS server you could spoof one of your systems for Ceiva’s and try that way