I recently got an *old* digital picture from Pandigital. It has on-board memory and an old-school mini USB port on it. When the USB cable is connected to a PC it shows up as an external drive and the screen stops showing pictures but instead shows a USB logo. When the cable is removed, then a menu appears and then about 30 seconds later it starts rotating through the pictures.
I decided to put an old Raspberry Pi to use and connected it to the picture frame. Then I cut the power line on the USB cable and attached it to GPIO so that the Pi can control when the cable is "attached". Wrote some Python code that pulls down a list of pictures and then downloads (or deletes) pictures from the mounted drive. Once all of the pictures are updated the GPIO changes state and the frame goes back to showing pictures. A cron job runs to swap out pictures a couple times a day when I'm typically not there. For WIFI connection I used an old Trendnet client device (which was a pain because the web client doesn't run in modern browsers.)
It's all working now, but the images it fetches tend to crop strange. Back in Microsoft Store the magical unicorn was using Image Magick, and so I used Image Magick to add extra padding around the images and it works great! I'm using the picture from to show a combination of pictures from my Facebook account and pictures from placekitten.com.
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