Digital Photo Keychains for Linux

[Ori Idan]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 7:16 PM, Tzafrir Cohen <tzafrir at cohens.org.il>wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 08:51:28AM +0300, Eli Marmor wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Do you know all those trendy Digital Photo Keychains?
> > These cute and tiny digital frames that are sold for 49-79 NIS and are
> > charged and fed by photos from a PC through USB?
> >
> > Well, I've always was sure that they use the standard flash disk
> > protocol with the computer, like all the other players (MP3, MP4, etc.)
> > and that their disk looks as a drive for your OS and you can just manage
> > the files there (copy/rename/remove/etc.) just like any other directory
> > or folder.
> >
> > I was amazed to find out that these devices require a special software
> > to manage them.
> >
> > It means that they don't work with Linux, most of them don't work with
> > MAC too, and that even the thousands software packages which were
> > developed for Windows (!) can't access them (because they are not like
> > "drives" with normal "files", but just a black box which only the user
> > can access and only through the special software).
> >
> > Since there are hundreds of models, I can't believe that all of them
> > use this crazy was of working and that none uses the standard flash
> > disk protocol.
> >
> > I'll be glad to hear models that use the standard protocol (like all of
> > the MP3, MP4, disk-on-key, etc.).
>
> Any idea what it would take to reflash one of those with a nicer
> firmware?
>
>
To rewrite the firmware one must know the processor used there, it's memory
map, amount of memory, peripheral addresses etc.
I don't think it's easy to do.

-- 
Ori Idan
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