Jim's Depository

I ordered a pair of Kodak Pulse 7" wifi picture frames from Provantage about 90 days ago which was long enough to forget, so it was like a little surprise gift to myself.

I intend to rip them open and see if I can replace their firmware with something I can control, but I fired one up to see if it could be made to work as a remote webcam viewer with its intended firmware.

I have to say I am impressed. The picture quality is quite nice. The web site for controlling the content is very nice (except that their applet signature does not have a valid signature). You can feed it from a web page, email, facebook, or some Kodak online gallery.

But here is the thing that makes me feel best about it:

On the support system they have an actual, honest, system status display. Very classy.

The 30 minute hacking report is:

• I don't think I can make it display a once/{timeunit} update of a webcam using the intended APIs. I could mail a new image to it regularly, but it doesn't display the latest one by preference. There is not a way to email a "delete". - It contacts Kodak home base (running on Amazon's EC2, S3, and CloudFront) once per minute where it does:
  1. Some secret SSL shrouded query that they don't let me see. 2. An NTP lookup from a random server on the planet. 3. An HTTP query to see if it needs an update, nice XML response. 4. If needed, the files are then requested by a UUID and come down by HTTP. - Blocking the SSL shrouded query stops the others, but I'm pretty sure I could make a proxy to replace the content with my own. This however only works for picture frames in my domains where I control the routers and can intercept. - I captured its firmware upgrade. The file will be useful.

Looking forward:

• I need to look at Amazon data rates and see if it would be abusive to use their browser API to upload and delete pictures, say once a minute all day. I'm sure that's more traffic than they expect, but perhaps the total cost is small enough to be ethical. - I'm itching to pop apart the 2nd unit, but I will wait until I have time to photodocument to see what is on the inside of these things.