Author Topic: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?  (Read 6673 times)

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Offline aabbccTopic starter

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Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« on: January 07, 2019, 05:30:04 pm »
So I did my usually weekly dumpster search in the office electronics dumpster and snagged one of these:






Yes I replaced the promotional video with some random clip I found.

There were in total 3 large unopened shipping boxes and 1 opened box, each box contained 40x of these...Probably some HR person expressed some interest in their system and the company send 120x of these things as promotional material and they went straight to the dumpster room, quite sad and disgusting when you think about it...

I was thinking about trying to accommodate the screen for a raspberry pi or something. Sure I could just salvage the batteries and screen but hey, wheres the fun in that.
 

Offline schmitt trigger

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Re: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« Reply #1 on: January 07, 2019, 05:36:49 pm »
There is another thread here in this forum which precisely discusses E-waste and the environmental disaster it creates.

I remember when plain Christmas Greeting cards were considered wasteful. This is an order of magnitude worse.

I think, at the very least, you could salvage the batteries.
 

Offline RoGeorge

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Re: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« Reply #2 on: January 07, 2019, 05:41:32 pm »
For 120 of them, it would make sense to reverse engineer them up to the point of being able to reuse the hardware, or at least to reprogram the movie.

Offline aabbccTopic starter

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Re: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« Reply #3 on: January 07, 2019, 05:58:18 pm »
There is another thread here in this forum which precisely discusses E-waste and the environmental disaster it creates.

I remember when plain Christmas Greeting cards were considered wasteful. This is an order of magnitude worse.

I think, at the very least, you could salvage the batteries.

Yea its horrific tbh...Yea true, but then I would just be sitting with a shit ton of batteries Id probably never use :P

For 120 of them, it would make sense to reverse engineer them up to the point of being able to reuse the hardware, or at least to reprogram the movie.

Hehe it was just a matter of plugging the provided usb cable to the computer and it showed up as a USB device, I switched out the mp4 just to try it out since the provided mp4 was some corprate dude talking about their amazing hr/finance system
 

Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« Reply #4 on: January 07, 2019, 06:03:06 pm »
From the picture the main SOC seems to be an ATJ2273B (a bit erased on the pic but looks like the most probable fit).

You can find a datasheet here: https://datasheetspdf.com/datasheet/ATJ2273B.html
And there seems to be a schematic using it there: http://www.go-gddq.com/upload/2017-08/17081516033140.pdf
So that may help figuring out the LCD connections and such.
 

Offline Fred27

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Re: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« Reply #5 on: January 07, 2019, 07:16:07 pm »
We use workday software at work. It's abysmal. I was amazed when I saw an advertisement for it and realised it wasn't just some temporary thing they gave the worst developer on the office to do to keep him out of everyone's hair.
 

Offline stmdude

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Re: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« Reply #6 on: January 07, 2019, 07:30:21 pm »
If you're in the southern parts of Skåne, I can take a few off your hands. I'd like to reverse-engineer the LCD interface on them.  (Pinout, rates, etc)
 

Offline amyk

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Re: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« Reply #7 on: January 07, 2019, 10:57:00 pm »
That's a "second-generation" MP4 player SoC. Pretty powerful if you consider that less than a decade ago decoding that video would've taken a desktop PC. At least for the first generation there are a bunch of tools for modding the firmware, but I left that scene before the 2nd generation became common so I'm not so sure about them.

If I had 120 of those I would arrange them in a 12x10 grid and have each of them play a slice of an HD video...
 

Offline RoGeorge

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Re: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« Reply #8 on: January 08, 2019, 12:11:24 am »
Or, stitch all 120 of them to a jacket, and made a human video billboard  :D

Offline texaspyro

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Re: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« Reply #9 on: January 08, 2019, 04:13:14 am »
Or, stitch all 120 of them to a jacket, and made a human video billboard  :D

All playing pron, of course...   >:D
 

Offline cdev

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Re: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« Reply #10 on: January 08, 2019, 04:41:55 am »
It would be just great if it 1.) could be used as an RPI display or 2.) could run Linux and access a network.

Its a shame it isn't a touch screen!
"What the large print giveth, the small print taketh away."
 

Offline t1d

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Re: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« Reply #11 on: January 08, 2019, 05:22:57 am »
In the USA, we have "MakerSpace" clubs... They are groups of DIYers. They might like some. So would an electronics class, or club, at a local school.
« Last Edit: January 09, 2019, 06:48:25 am by t1d »
 

Offline technix

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Re: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« Reply #12 on: January 08, 2019, 08:39:22 am »
I would want one just so I can reprogram it into something more useful.
 

Offline capt bullshot

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Re: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« Reply #13 on: January 08, 2019, 09:27:29 am »
If you're in the southern parts of Skåne, I can take a few off your hands. I'd like to reverse-engineer the LCD interface on them.  (Pinout, rates, etc)

Once back in the time, I got my hands on one of the previous generation ones. I did some investigation, was able to replace the video (had to attach a button to the board and press it 4 times to enable the USB), and figured out the LCD interface being a quite standard 40 (or maybe 50) pin parallel RGB interface. Could be easily driven by any standard controller or FPGA.
So I put it back to the pile of junk ...
Anyway, if I had as many of them as the OP does, I'd consider making some kind of video wall from it, as I sometimes like to make blinky things (http://wunderkis.de/Blinkenlights/blinkenlights.html)
Safety devices hinder evolution
 

Offline capt bullshot

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Re: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« Reply #14 on: January 08, 2019, 09:31:30 am »
Yea its horrific tbh...Yea true, but then I would just be sitting with a shit ton of batteries Id probably never use :P

Oh, that batteries might be useful. I've made a >= 1kWh battery out of a shitload of discarded company swag shitty chinese USB power banks. The battery is finished and working, but still waiting to be integrated here: http://wunderkis.de/pvbat/index.html
Safety devices hinder evolution
 

Offline madires

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Re: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« Reply #15 on: January 08, 2019, 11:38:16 am »
A multimedia art installation about e-junk?
 
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Online wraper

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Re: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« Reply #16 on: January 08, 2019, 12:52:48 pm »
Remove LCD and try selling on ebay.
 

Offline Richard Crowley

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Re: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« Reply #17 on: January 08, 2019, 01:12:20 pm »
Glue on new paper overlay and sell them a premium programmable greeting cards.
If you marketed them cleverly, you could probably sell them for $50 each.
 
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Offline coppercone2

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Re: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« Reply #18 on: January 08, 2019, 01:28:46 pm »
try to make a trench coat that acts as optical camouflage

or a stealth car

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=optical+camoflague+car
« Last Edit: January 08, 2019, 01:30:33 pm by coppercone2 »
 

Offline CJay

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Re: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« Reply #19 on: January 08, 2019, 04:46:24 pm »
Didn't Dave do a teardown of something similar and work out how to upload new files to it?
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« Reply #20 on: January 08, 2019, 05:29:17 pm »
That's pretty cool, I have a similar device meant for advertising animal heartworm medication which was sent unsolicited to a vet clinic. I replaced the videos on it and played around with it. Looking inside it's essentially the guts for a digital photo frame.

If you search on ebay for Video Brochure there are people trying to get ~$50 each for this sort of thing. I wouldn't pay that much, but they're handy little video players.
 

Offline aabbccTopic starter

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Re: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« Reply #21 on: January 09, 2019, 12:57:34 pm »
Ok I'll say it again:

Uploading your own media files to the device was the first thing I did by simply connecting the device with the included usb cable to my laptop, it showed up as a removable storage device and had a folder called video, simple moving a media file to that folder was all that was required.

I guess I could try and resell them but tbh thats way too much effort and I got better way to spend my time :P I'll try to post a few devices to the people here that asked for them.

Also the screen is super low resolution so I doubt it would make for a decent raspberry pi screen.
 

Offline schmitt trigger

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Re: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« Reply #22 on: January 09, 2019, 02:57:24 pm »
Still, for the sake of environment, I sincerely hope that you will recycle or reuse them.
I know that you will  ;)

Or give them away for free. Just request that they refund you any postage and handling.
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« Reply #23 on: January 09, 2019, 06:33:26 pm »
I bet if you posted them on ebay for $10 + postage they would sell like hotcakes, if it didn't cost so much to ship overseas I'd buy a few to play with. You could use them as-is as digital photo frames or video players.
 
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Offline Apollyon25_

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Re: Now what can I do with 120x of these...?
« Reply #24 on: January 31, 2019, 02:37:43 am »
Or you could put them back in their boxes and ship them to the company who sent them all out, suggesting that they dispose of them responsibly, and in future maybe examine their *need* for such wasteful advertising?
 


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