Seagate Dockstar - use a digital photo frame as display

I wanted to put a cheap display on my Seagate Dockstar that I am currently using as Internet Radio and AirPlay receiver (using mpd and mpc).

After some research, I found some recommended suitable displays. The displays I bought are based on the "AppoTech AX206" chip and are  supported by LCD4Linux, but the display firmware needs to be "hacked" first to allow it to be used from Linux.

I got a lot of information from this post: Digital Picture Frame as a router status display and the OpenWRT forum. See here for more info and supported devices.

I got the display to work on the Raspberry Pi successfully, now onto the next device.

Some Dockstar instructions are here (in German): LCD Display an DockStar


Installation on the Dockstar:
Unfortunately the LCD4Linux version installable with "apt-get install lcd4linux" is too old and does not include the needed DPF drivers. So we need to rebuild LCD4Linux.


0. Hack the LCD firmware, please refer to the links above for this.

1.install necessary dependency packages

apt-get install libgd2-noxpm

2. install SVN and other dependencies to be able to build lcd4linux

apt-get install subversion
apt-get install pkg-config  automake autoconf make checkinstall
apt-get install libtool libusb-dev


(Note: these files might take up quite a lot of space, about 40+ MB on my system. They are only necessary to successfully compile LCD4Linux)


3. make a folder where to put the LCD4Linux files, e.g. /home/root/dpf

cd /home/root
mkdir dpf


4. get (checkout) the LCD4Linux files (currently this is revision 1200):

svn co https://ssl.bulix.org/svn/lcd4linux/trunk lcd4linux

5. build the DPF version of LCD4Linux

cd lcd4linux
./bootstrap
./configure --with-drivers='DPF' --with-plugins='all,!dbus'


6. install the LCD4Linux package

checkinstall -D



On success you should get:

**********************************************************************

 Done. The new package has been installed and saved to

 /home/root/dpf/lcd4linux/lcd4linux_0.11.0-1200-1_armel.deb

 You can remove it from your system anytime using:

      dpkg -r lcd4linux

**********************************************************************


Notes:
 - checkinstall will ask for a name, I used "LCD4Linux with DPF"
 - checkinstall will complain aboput the version number, so I used "0.11.0-1200" since 1200 was the SVN revision that was used
 - as noted in the success message, the installed package can be removed with "dpkg -r lcd4linux"



7. create or adjust your LCD4Linux configuration file 
 - the file needs to be located in /etc and called lcd4linux.conf


or get an example file from here:


wget http://pkern.at/wp-content/uploads/lcd4linux/lcd4linux.conf

Note: the permissions on the lcd4linux.conf file need to be set as:

chmod 600 lcd4linux.conf


8. start/restart LCD4Linux

kill lcd4linux && sleep 1 && lcd4linux

Success:

9. Adjust lcd4linux.conf file according to your needs