About a year ago, I bought my parents a Phillips digital frame with wireless which (8FF3WMI) could read directly from a feed with no third party software. As long as you don't use the URL anywhere else, no one will be able to find it.

I built a small web interface for it where we can all upload pictures. My family is in different parts of the world so it's nice to send the pictures right into my parents' living room with two mouse clicks.

The frame re-scans the feed about every 10 minutes.

I did something similar with the Philips frame, bought one for my parents and my in-laws and they both have their own dedicated galleries in a self-hosted Gallery2 installation, which allows me and the rest of my family to upload through the web, via email or directly from windows with the 'publish to the web' feature. Works great. Only complaint that I have with this frame is that it reloads every image every time it's shown, rather than caching it. Don't know why, it does cause high bandwidth usage :/

I know of options for that sort of thing (look for "digital signage") but the pricing is not in the same ballpark as a digital photo frame. (In Japan at least, it is sufficiently expensive that I think going the Panic way is probably cheaper if you plan on providing your own programming.)

Yeah, everything I've found thus far it'd make sense to just get a Fit PC and a small LCD - it'd be nice if there was a small frame like this that was hackable (a la the WRT54g) for a small status display.

If you really ever want to get into the digital signage options in Japan, I can bore your brain you with companies with cheap computers/monitors/etc.

But no, you'll never get anything as cheap as these buffalo monitors.

7" usb monitor. $99 USD.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/usb-gadgets/c609/

Hmm and $99 for a Sheeva Plug and you have a very nice combo....

$95 http://www.amazon.com/Kodak-EasyShare-W820-Wireless-Digital/...

Comments suggest you can place any RSS feed into it.

Sadly, it looks like that gets syndicated through Kodak's website, which isn't kosher for my needs. Sigh.

Anyone have this frame?

It looks like a good solution

Why are we all doing this with RSS feeds?

I want a frame that serves up a samba folder over a wifi network. That's all. I can make a dozen different things that stuff pictures dynamically into that folder, all the frame needs to do is cycle through them.

The Buffalo photo-frame does the opposite: read a samba folder over a network.

It just ALSO has support for windows frameit, flicker and picasa.

It's a pretty nice piece of hardware.

That sounds perfect. Thanks for the tip.

Here's what you can do: draw an image using GD, I don't know if you have GD in Ruby. PHP has it, I am sure you can hack a little script for that. Feed the generated image the photo frame and Bob's your uncle.

Chumby, http://www.chumby.com/, is a device that's made to be easily hackable. However, the screen size is small.

Make the chumby into a sleek, passively charged thinclient and you could have something that might compete in the ipad space as a home internet appliance. Make sure you have stuff like a camera, mic, touch screen, accelerometer, decent speakers and you have a lot of possibilities (it sits somewhere and displays a slideshow/clock/widgets, you pick it up and you could take skype calls or video chat directly with another networked device, record something and have it saved on the main pc, etc) The key though would be to make it cheap enough so that you could buy several and network them together in a household/office environment.

The new Chumby makes me think of the monitor Riker and Picard used in TNG. I shall make me a captains chair as soon as I can get a chumby.