Anyone here ever hack a Memento Smart Frame?

[Kerry Givens]

Hi everyone. Hoping to get some guidance from this community of experts re/ my very expensive and now totally worthless Memento Smart Picture Frame. Permit me a moment to lay out my little saga:

Memento was a successful Kickstarter launch back in 2016. When it came out, it was the ONLY large, high res (4K) display that had a 3:2 aspect ratio--- exactly the shape needed to display photos taken with a fulll frame DSLR camera. I bought one around late 2018 with the plan of using it to display my photos in an exhibit I'm giving this summer.

Photos looked eye-popping on the Memento with its 35" screen, but to load those pictures into the frame, you had to use the manufacturer's app to first upload the pictures to the company server, which would then dole them to the frame's internal memory. A little inconvenient, but it worked. That is, it worked until the company went out of business just a few months after I bought the frame. One day they quietly shut down operations, including their server. Killing the server made it impossible to load pictures onto the frame, effectively killing the device.

There are other large displays on the market---- Meural is one of them--- but as best I can tell, there are NO other displays that have a 3:2 aspect ratio. Putting a DSLR photo on a typical 16:9 monitor/TV panel(including Meural)  is either going to crop my picture, or put ugly black spacer bars on either side. This was not a problem with the Memento.

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone, and probably hundreds of others who bought a Memento screen watched their purchase instantly die when the company shut down their servers. As I looked at my dead Memento, I thought---- there's got to be a way to resurrect this, somehow cripple it's current controller and load in a new controller to change the device back from a $900 paperweight into a beautiful object of art again. And if I can find a way---- I bet lots of other Memento owners would be immensely grateful if I could tell them how to do it also.

So I'm wondering and hoping someone here might have some firsthand  knowledge about doing a brain transplant on the Memento. I have never done any hacking before and so am totally green. Any advice?

I'll be taking the back off the Memento this weekend just to see what kind of circuitry is hidden inside. There are only two ivisible external inputs--- a USB 2.0 jack, and a USB 3.0 jack. One has a nubbin-sized Wi-fi transmitter plugged into it, the other is empty.

I don't know this for a fact, but I'm betting that the 3:2 aspect ratio is just a trick---- I suspect the display panel probably is a 16:9 TV module which has been framed with an artist's matte so that the visible portion of the 16:9 panel is compressed down to 3:2. We'll see!

In the meantime, thanks mightily to anyone who can offer and help in this rescue mission.

---Kerry

[Jeremias Volker]

Hi Kerry,

Welcome and thanks for reaching out in the Openframe forum. 

I'm very sorry to hear about your Memento frame and very well understand your frustration. I don't own a Memento nor do I know anyone else who owns one but I would like to help you making use of it again. It’s a shame when these devices just become unusable due to corporate decisions.

To think about ideas, could you please provide as much information as you can, like:

• Send pictures from the outside ports and the inside of the device including technical components and wires and ports you can see  
• Do you know what technology the controller is based on? Eg. Android
• What are the current errors you are seeing? On your device and app. Ideally, send screenshots or photos, maybe that gives a hint of what the underlying system is.
• Do you have any manual to the device or more information by the manufacturer?

Watch out for the display connector inside the case. If it's HDMI, you are lucky and can simply hook up a Raspberry Pi running Openframe.

I hope this was helpful and looking forward to seeing what you are going to get back with.

Jerry