I picked up a couple Juiceboxes and MP3/picture kits a few months ago when they were on clearance at WalMart. A few days ago I noticed they were on clearance now at Target (you can get both the unit and the MP3/picture kit for a total of $24 plus tax) and I posted to the linux-hacker forums that Target had them on clearance now. Today, there is a slashdot post about them. Hopefully now someone will figure out how to make it play our own videos.
Poking around online, I found this post talking about using it as an e-book reader. I hadn’t thought of that! So, since I had some lying around, I tried it. In about 10 minutes I was reading text on my Juicebox. Here’s how I did it:
- Download and install JPEGBook
- Set the size in JPEGBook to be 240×160
- Run JPEGBook on a text file
- Use the Juicebox software to import the new book jpgs to your Juicebox.
- Read and enjoy!
Here is the JPG that I put on the Juicebox:
Here is a picture of the Juicebox displaying the text image (click to enlarge - it’s readable!). It looks much better in person - the screenshot looks a bit blue and washed out:
UPDATE: Here is a Flickr photo showing the button functions (point at the buttons):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brianpipa/17335231/
Technorati: juicebox, ebooks, ebook reader, hack, slashdot
June 3rd, 2005 at 11:37 pm
Brian, that’s great! Thanks for posting the picture.
BTW, how do you “leaf” through a book? I take it there’s a button for “Next page” and perhaps one for “Previous page”? Any more?
June 4th, 2005 at 3:50 am
To leaf through, the upper left button is PREV, the next one down is NEXT. I put up a Flickr photo with notes sjhowing what the buttons do:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/89373585@N00/17335231/
Brian
June 4th, 2005 at 5:30 am
Mattel’s megacheap e-book reader
Mattel, known mostly for the Barbie doll, and for the aggresive way in which it tries to “protect” its “trademark”, brought out an MP3/video player called the Juicebox.
Perhaps it did not catch on, because several US chain stores slashed its pri…
June 4th, 2005 at 10:30 am
[…] ally numbered JPEGs, which then can be read on the Juicebox. More on the Teleread blog and at Brian’s. Photo: Brian P The only pity so far seems to be that JPEGbook will not anti-ali […]
June 4th, 2005 at 6:25 pm
I saw the slashdot, literally fled out of my house and sped to Walmart to find they didn’t have them, and then lucked out with Target. So I have two. It’s a pity the picture frame person’s “hack” really just consisted of using the media card. However:
Link to Linux hacker forum
Forget JPEG; it loads it’s own custom bitmaps, which you can throw on the card directly. Which means, no artifacts, no image loss. I personally plan on using mine so I don’t have to boot up a computer and load acrobat everytime I need a pinout…
June 5th, 2005 at 2:32 am
Zach, sounds cool! How do you convert a text file to an image file though?
June 5th, 2005 at 10:36 pm
Read ebooks on the Juicebox
The Juicebox is a cheap (under $25 in some stores) music, video, photo viewer from Mattel aimed at kids. There are some hacking projects going on, and we’ll have some articles on that soon, but here’s a good how-to on putting ebooks on one using JPE…
June 5th, 2005 at 11:35 pm
Teleread has photos of a children’s picture book by Ellen Hage.
June 7th, 2005 at 10:14 am
Hello Brian,
I have posted a small program called GDBook at my blog to convert texts to images. It is not as usable as JPEGBook, but it will break lines at word boundaries, and will output as PNG instead of JPEG, so that you can losslessly convert to the Juice Box native format as outlined at the Linux-hackers’ Juice Box forum.
Could you perhaps post this to the Linux-hacker forum? They might be interested. (I am not a subscriber.)
June 7th, 2005 at 4:12 pm
My JuiceBox hacking site. Looks like crap, but I’ll fix it up later. Features the JBRemix of GDBook, which saves straight to JBP and takes command line args (make sure you have them enabled in php.ini!) and some tech docs I formatted for use with the JB. Happy hacking!
October 1st, 2005 at 8:33 pm
Do you know how it could be used as a WMV player
RESPONSE: Currently it can’t. Keep an eye on the Linux-Hacker forums for the latest progress in hacking it so it can play our own movies. –Brian
January 30th, 2006 at 6:06 pm
does any one know where i can get the software that comes on the cd i lost it and dont know where to look
February 20th, 2006 at 6:54 pm
[…] y things snaking about… Juicey’s an E-Book reader - The other day I followed a how-to from MyVogonPoetry and conve […]
June 22nd, 2006 at 4:42 am
Thanks man, your article is quite helpful.
Zam
Ray Digital - Ebook Design, Ebook Development
http://www.raydigital.com
August 25th, 2006 at 3:56 pm
[…] Another user has made it into an e-book reader. […]
August 21st, 2007 at 8:47 pm
[…] Originally Syndicated via RSS from del.icio.us/tag/diy Free Chat + Singles @ MocoSpace […]
September 20th, 2007 at 11:29 am
the price????
August 2nd, 2008 at 12:19 pm
This is cool. And you can also search online for pdf to text converters so that you can put pdf e-books on your mp3 player.