Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album

The Ben Borgers blog shows how to take a used Nook eReader with its eInk display and use it as an inexpensive display for photos.

For this project I went with a Nook Simple Touch Reader. You can find them on eBay or Facebook Marketplace for $10-$30 used.

The reason to go with a Nook instead of a Kindle or another e-reader is that Nooks run Android under the hood. That means they’re far easier to root and to run Android apps on.

After you get it running Android, you can run an ancient Android app called Electric Sign. This app allows you to put any website on the Nook’s screen and have it refresh at a given interval, with a catch: the Nook doesn’t support SSL. Therefore I had to set up a website that uses http:// instead of https://, which is remarkably difficult in this day and age.

I wanted to source the images from a shared iCloud photo album. That way, I could share the album with my parents, and they could add new photos that would show up on the frame right from their Photos app.

iCloud photo albums have no API. However, if you share an iCloud photo album to a public link, you can use the Developer Tools to inspect the API requests Apple is making to get the photos.

Read all the details in the post here.

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