Happy Birthday to me! Once again i got a digital picture-frame, but this time, big time! Samsung's SPF-83V has wifi, video- and mp3-functions.
In today's article I'll describe his features and how i use it as a FSC-Status-Monitor (flat-sharing-community) to display up2date infos in the flats hall.The script is available now !!

SPF-83V

Technical Data

8", resolution: 800x600, 64MB internal memory, reads sd/mmc, microSD up to 8gb and cf-cards, usable is external datasource via USB.
The really cool and new feature here is definitily the wifi-interface, detailed infos later.
The frame runs on a RMI alchemy-processor with winCE 5.0 as OS.

File formats

It displays every common format, including mpeg1/2/4-videos and mp3-files. ATTENTION: You can't mix images and videos, only one at a time! You can add mp3-files to play in the background to your slide-shows.

WiFi

As soon as you enter the needed data like ssid and password (yes, he can do wep and wpa/2 !), the frame connects to your wifi and gets his IP via dhcp.
With the web-interface (http://IP_OF_FRAME:5050) you can control the i-net-functions of the frame:
Either it gets his images from windows-live-space (whatever this is), or it parses feeds and regular html-pages and gehts the images for you. Alas, it refuses to parse php-pages.

FSC-Status-Monitor

The intention was to put the frame in our hall to display useful informations like cleaning-plan, shopping-list and messages.

Cleaning plan

Nothing much to say. A php-skript checks the date, calculates start- and endday of the week, and determines the brave workers to fight the dust in determined areas :)

Shopping list

Again, a php-skript with a database-connection. I coded a little web-frontend in which one can select needed items and insert new ones in a text box. Articles are divided in standard- and non-standard-articles. The standard ones always show with a checkbox, the non-standars only show when selected, and in a drop-down-box.
Selected items show up on the shopping-list in the final image then.

Messages

You name it. One can input messages in the web-frontend, or send them via eMail to our secret FSC-address. A skript parses the messages, saves the content to the database and displays them in the image..

Putting it all together

So, we got these nice scripts up and running, we got content, only thing we have to do is put it all together in a nice picture to show up in the hall. I use php with gd to accomplish this, and as you can see, it works nice:

Script

Now its available (README included):