JuiceBox

Home Up VNC2 Adafruit RGB LED Matrix Visual Spin YModem Wavetable Midi Player Prop EKG Basic Window/Form System PropMonitor 1-Bit Bitmaps 6-Bit Bitmaps DAC Sparkfun Nokia LCD Cameras MP3 Wireless JuiceBox I/O Expansion Via I2C Secure Digital (SD) Card Interface Notes on Graphics_Demo.spin ADC 2-Bit Bitmap App TV Colors Interleaved Character Generator 4-Color Character Applet VGA Colors Applets

bullet

The Juicebox is a cheap (~$5) failed toy video player.  But, it has been hacked by many people and much is known about it.  I'm interested in using it as a wireless weather station (that also shows photos).  Here's scheme:

bullet

The Juicebox is easily modified to read SD cards and become a photo viewer or MP3 player.  I'm just looking at the photo viewer aspect.  Mattel even sold an SD card adapter kit, you can probably still buy.  But, the unit I bought from Amazon.com (price actually increased to $10)came with a sample clip (Vans Triple Crown) (the clip that comes with the player is just a dummy and doesn't have a card edge!).  This sample clip was easily modified to connect to an external SD card:

bullet
  This is the wiring diagram I got from here.
bullet

Several sites say that the card only reads up to 512 MB SD cards, but it works just fine with my 1 GB card.  I think more important is the cluster size.  Probably the same limitations as with the Propeller's SD card interface (both only read the root directory).

bullet

The above mod makes the unit a Digital Photo Frame.  However, it only shows pictures in it's own ".jbp" format, headerless 12-bit (rrrrggggbbbb).   There is a java image converter here

bullet

My plan is to share the SD card with the Propeller.  I believe this scheme may work with any Digital Photo Frame (going to test soon!)  It took some work to figure this out, but here's what I have working:

bullet
Circuit Diagram:  
bullet
I now have a working driver that copies the Prop's VGA screen (30 columns x 15 rows) onto the SD card while monitoring the JB's control of the SD card clock signal.  It can work with the Juicebox in slideshow mode with 2 s refresh.  Here the code and a picture of the setup:
bullet