Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

Juicebox Hacking

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wed Jun 01, 2005 12:45 PM
from the because-you-can dept.
Hardware Hacking Hardware
magic_user writes "Now that Mattel's JuiceBox can be had for $12 (Target, WalMart), this seems like a perfect toy for hackers. I've found a picture frame hack but what I'm really looking for is a way to play my own videos on it. It runs uclinux so this shouldn't be too hard, right? "
+ -
story
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Juicebox Hacking 50 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.

  • $12? Hardly... (Score:5, Informative)

    by garcia (6573) * on Wednesday June 01 2005, @12:46PM (#12696236) Homepage
    From what I can see (walmart.com, amazon.com, and froogle.com) the JuiceBox is about $40 to $50. The only place I can find it quoted for being less is at the blog that this story links to... Perhaps they were on sale, the unit was in an opened package, or the online prices do not reflect the in-store ones. I don't know. YMMV.

    It seems that this [elinux.org] would have been a more informative link to include in the story as it gives quite a bit of information about the JuiceBox and links to some of the code from Emsoft.

    It does seem like an interesting device to putz around with but I'll hold out until you can display pics via wlan to it :)

  • hacking? (Score:5, Funny)

    by justforaday (560408) on Wednesday June 01 2005, @12:47PM (#12696248)
    I wouldn't exactly call it "hacking," but I've been modding juiceboxes for years. All it involves is a straw...
    • I agree.

      I really like the effect known as "laughing so hard the juice goes out one's nose" trick which is practiced in lunchrooms across the country.

    • Re:hacking? (Score:5, Funny)

      by lpangelrob2 (721920) on Wednesday June 01 2005, @12:54PM (#12696335) Journal
      I wouldn't exactly call it "hacking," but I've been modding juiceboxes for years. All it involves is a straw...

      Have you ever noticed what color the hole that you stick the straw is? Silver. That's right. It's tinfoil.

      There's something in these "juiceboxes" that they don't want us to know about, and someday our meddling with juiceboxes with straws will get us in trouble...

    • Maybe my modding is a bit more advanced then yours, but it involves a funnel and some vodka.

      Either that, or I'm an alcoholic. You decide.
    • All it involves is a straw...

      The straw??? Now you tell me! I've been lifting up one corner flap and chewing it off to get to the juice...

    • Re:hacking? (Score:4, Funny)

      by morcheeba (260908) * on Wednesday June 01 2005, @02:21PM (#12697276) Journal
      I modded my juice box in highschool.

      The goal was to make the drink still cold for my long bus ride home in the afternoon. Even when I froze the drink, it got warm sitting in my locker. I started by making a form-fitting styrofoam cooler out of left-over packing material. The walls were probably 1/4" thick. Result: cool, but not ice-cold. So, on my second try, I found some thicker sytrofoam (1/2-3/4") and built a box out of that. Result: still frozen solid - success! Of course I couldn't drink it, but that wasn't the point...
      • Just like that lovely Japanese song "Fushigi na Poketto." This is the song about where you have a biscuit in your pocket, you slap it, wow! Now you have two. Repeat, now you have three... Your fantastic pocket makes more biscuits!

        This wonderful song used to cheer up the Japanese kids while they starving during WWII.

  • Arm port of Debian (Score:4, Interesting)

    by James_Duncan8181 (588316) on Wednesday June 01 2005, @12:48PM (#12696259) Homepage
    Get the ARM port of Debian on there and compile mplayer to an ARM target. Failing that use the debian port of Xine. Does this rate a /. article?
    • MPlayer and Xine would probably be too slow. I'm digging through the specs now, but my guess is that this has a built-in MPEG decoder chip. Alternatively, it might just accept the hit in ROM costs and store the video in a poorly compressed format. It would certainly make sense if all you're storing are a few, low-res, low-quality music videos.

    • Or you could just go grab the juicebox source [emsoftltd.com] from emsoft [emsoftltd.com] and save yourself some time.

      -theGreater.
    • I don't think it will be quite that easy. The CPU in this thing is an ARM7 with no MMU - which is why it runs uclinux instead of regular linux. That means that you can't just drop regular packages onto it. I think that you need to custom locate (in memory) each package that you want to run, and compile it yourself. I could be wrong - but it certainly isn't going to be as easy as just running Debian on it.

  • In the words of Meatwad... (Score:5, Funny)

    by The_Rippa (181699) * on Wednesday June 01 2005, @12:50PM (#12696281)
    ...do what now?

  • Noisy website (Score:5, Informative)

    by th77 (515478) on Wednesday June 01 2005, @12:52PM (#12696311)
    You could have warned us that the JuiceBox link leads to an obnoxiously noisy site. Fun way to get noticed at work. Yick.
    • I was annoyed at it and I don't even have speakers plugged in to my workstation.
    • This was clearly posted by a peeved off Admin trying to catch people out -
    • See, the fact that you can even hear sound from your PC at work is a foreign concept to me. Everywhere I've worked, hooking actual speakers to a workstation would get you smacked down pretty quickly. If you actually need the sound, they've invented tiny speakers you can temporarily strap to your ears that let you hear the sound without anyone else having to.

      I'd never even think to warn about the sound on a site because I don't have publicly audible speakers connected to any PC I own except the one in my ho
    • ... thanks ed, sure bet my housemates appreciated the sudden and stupidly loud "JUICEBOX!" at 4.28AM
  • ...it's that hardware intended for kids is usually useless for anything else. I've seen quite a few electronic gizmos in recent years, and every time I look at hacking them into a more general purpose device, I find that they are far too mission specific to be of any real-world use. Half the time you open them up and find nothing more than a chip, small PCB, and some epoxy holding the whole thing together.

    If you're interested in replicating this, it might make a "fun" home project to build one using services like Pad2Pad [pad2pad.com], Digikey, and a handful of parts. Once you have the design down, you can sell them in bulk for a similar cost. Perhaps even as "developer kits" that allow others to fool around with them. Just don't waste your time on a toy. :-/
    • I find that they are far too mission specific to be of any real-world use. Half the time you open them up and find nothing more than a chip, small PCB, and some epoxy holding the whole thing together
      Well there goes MY hopes and dreams of a Furby Robot Army of DOOOOOOM.
    • Holy shitsky, somebody mod the parent up! Maybe I'm just a luser who hasn't been paying attention, but this Pad2Pad thing is extremely cool. Custom PC board fab on the cheap. Zow.
        • Actually, it is. The chip you've just described is an "all-in-one" hardware design. The catch is that it seems like a flexible all-in-one design. And with an LCD screen, what could be better?

          We have different opinions of "all in one", apparently. If you've got some sort of embedded PIC with OTP ROM, and it's embedded in epoxy, yah, you're probably done (hence "all-in-one" - this is more of a "all-in-three-or-four"). But this has a lot of hackability in it, as you've got easy access to all of the address a
            • The only redeeming factor that I see to this hardware is that it's an inexpensive LCD.

              Plus a cheap MP3 player. It's probably got just enough oomph to be an Ogg player as well. The LCD screen actually makes it so that you can actually have a decent GUI.

              Other than that, let's see... with a serial port, you could easily make a universal remote control with LCD screen, a digital picture frame (as seen above), or a status monitor for X (where X is some other project that spits out serial data).

              Of course, if
  • I have RTF, well, links.
    What's the resolution/physical size of the screen in this thing?
  • Could someone please explain what this thing does and doesn't? The website doesn't really say much.
  • I wouldn't mind spending $20 on a DIY digital picture frame that I could upload pix to while traveling on business. It seems no one can agree on the price and functionality out-of-the-box here.

  • Buy one now (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TimmyDee (713324) on Wednesday June 01 2005, @01:01PM (#12696422) Homepage Journal
    Because it won't be a product for very long. Other than for hackers and a few "must have everything" kids, I can't see this succeeding as a product. The number of qualifiers/caveats/limitations of this thing as mentioned in the FAQ are ridiculous. Want to play MP3s? You need to purchase special software. Oh, and the sound quality is limited to 128 K/s, so all those songs you ripped at higher quality won't work. Want to watch movies? Again, special software. To store anything, you'll need an SD or MMC card (not included) to boost the storage past the 32 MB. The game selection is bound to be limited as they are cartridge based and proprietary.

    Oh, and one more thing: It's not cool. By the time kids will be able to use it, they'll be old enough to know they want an iPod/GameBoy SP/PSP/DS/etc. and not some childish thing from Mattel.
  • and was greeted with the most horrible noise! It sounded like someone singing "Yeah, Yeah" over and over again, horribly clipped and distorted.

    Does the actual hardware sound better than that? And why does it use MP3 instead of something that sounds better at a lower bitrate like WMA?

  • here are the technical specs (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 01 2005, @01:05PM (#12696466)
    2.75 inch 240x160 color LCD
    http://www.elinux.org/wiki/JuiceBox [elinux.org]
  • Rather than hacking the JuiceBox, you might want to consider getting a VideoNow Jr and hacking that instead. There are filters out there for VideoDub, and if you don't mind a bit of dremeling, you can get it to accept a standard CD-R (get the silvery ones like Sony).

    You can put up to 35 minutes of encoded video on a CD-R at a decent quality (18fps) and sound.

    Why go this route rather than a portable DVD player? Somewhat cheaper, don't have to hold the unit folded open (big plus for my handicapped daughter) and RUGGED (bigger plus for my handicapped daughter). We've dropped ours numerous times on the concrete driveway getting her out of the car, and the unit skips and then keeps playing.

    Of course we're not total idiots, so we've bought a backup unit for the eventual day that the driveway is harder than expected :-)

  • While slightly off topic (Score:3, Interesting)

    by NeuroManson (214835) on Wednesday June 01 2005, @03:28PM (#12698057) Homepage
    While it doesn't play back DiVX/XViD/MPEG-4, Radio Shack has a portable DVD player for $99 after rebate, it has a 3.6" screen and is about the size of a portable CD player(I've tested one, and it has passable playback quality).

    http://www.radioshack.com/product.asp?catalog_name =CTLG&category_name=CTLG_003_003_004_000&product_i d=16-3912 [radioshack.com]

    I'm sure it can be taken apart and fiddled with, but for those who don't want to, it makes a satisfactory substitute.
    • I've tried several different browsers, but each time I go to the juicebox.com web page, all I get is an empty white page, or a white page with 'copyright 2005 Mattel' at the bottom.

      Oh no! All my plain white empty pages are going to receive DMCA takedown orders from Mattel now.

    • that's funny, i just get a button with an "f" on it that turns into a right-pointing triangle when i mouse over it
    • As someone else pointed out, though, the MP3 adapter is actually an SD card adapter, so there's not a 32MB limit

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.