Last week Wes Bos posted on X about hacking a cheap digital picture frame with AI and turning it into something of your own. The frame was about $50, and he'd put the whole thing in a repo. It sounded like fun. So I bought one. I was laid up on Sunday anyway, so I dug in.
The first problem showed up before I typed a word. The vendor had changed the hardware since Wes wrote his post. Different chip, different everything. Nothing in the repo was going to work on my frame.
That's a big deal. It's also normally the moment I put the thing back in the box and write a sternly worded review. Instead I made a bet: Claude was smarter than the hardware vendor. So we dug in together.
I won the bet. It took a couple of hours, but Claude found a way into the frame's boot process and put our own software on it. The frame was ours to do with as we pleased.
That is cool.
Then I had Claude write up the whole procedure, every step and every gotcha, for the next person (or the next agent) who buys this frame and finds out the repo doesn't work. We sent it back to Wes as a pull request. He did me a favor. Paying it forward is the least I can do.
Now what?
So now I had a fully unlocked frame and absolutely no idea what to put on it.
Yes, the obvious answer is pictures. It's a picture frame. I eventually caved on that too. But I figured there had to be more to it than a slideshow.
By default, Claude had it showing the weather. Those of you who know the Lovely and Talented Kathy know I don't need a frame to tell me the weather. She does that with glee, and in far greater detail than any frame ever will.
So I kept the weather, and then I kept going. Today the frame shows:
- The time and date
- Today's events from my Nextcloud calendar
- What's playing on my favorite radio station (a whole 'nother project I wrote)
- A panel from Home Assistant, so I can run the house from it
- Pictures (fine, Kathy, you win)
That's a lot to manage from a small touchscreen, so we also built a web console. Everything gets set there except the Wi-Fi. For that, each frame has a hidden admin screen where I can join a network so it can phone home and pick up its settings.
And the console doesn't just run one frame. It runs as many as I want. Plug in a new frame, give it Wi-Fi, and it shows up in the console ready to claim. From there I name it, pick what it shows, and push updates to it. Every frame gets its own setup. So if I build my mom one that shows nothing but pictures, it's a few clicks, not another Sunday.
I stopped because I ran out of ideas. For now.
This isn't about the frame
I'm not telling you this to brag. Earlier this year I wrote about the lock on the vault, that place in the back of my head marked "you don't have the talent for this." This is the same story, only with a paperclip in it.
I am not a hardware person. I can't use a soldering iron. I don't understand flashing EEPROMs, and I'm not entirely sure I could tell you what one is. A year ago this project would have died at the hardware change, and I'd have called it a lesson about reading reviews before you buy.
These days I don't have to be a hardware person. I have to be able to explain clearly what I want, and then let the model do the work.
I was literally the human reset button on this project. Every time we tried a new way into the hardware, I was standing by with my trusty bent paperclip. Press the pinhole. Wait. Tell Claude what the screen did. Repeat. That was my entire technical contribution. I'm serious.
The rest of my contribution was the part that's always been mine... deciding what the thing should do, and saying so clearly so the AI can understand what I want. (This is more of a skill than people realize.)
The lock is off the vault and the doors are swinging wide. If you can think it, you can build it.
Your turn
You have a list. Everybody does. It's the stuff you've filed under "not my thing." Hardware. Music. A mobile app. That tool you've wanted at work for three years. Projects you never started because step one needed a skill you don't have.
Pick one thing off that list this week. Sit down with an AI and explain, as clearly as you can, what you want. Don't write a prompt. Just describe the thing. Then do what it tells you, even if that means standing there holding a paperclip.
Thanks to Wes Bos for the idea and the head start. His post is the only reason this frame isn't still sitting in its box.
Now, take this post as your head start. Go build something you were sure you couldn't. Then tell people about it. Not to brag, but because somebody out there is still standing in front of their own vault, convinced the lock is on. Your story might be the one that shows them it isn't. Wes's did that for me.
And tell me too. I want to hear what came out of your vault.