green-techZONE Products for the week of March 1, 2004

The Beauty Of Recycled Electronics: Wallflower Digital Picture Frame Uses Recycled Computer Parts And Wi-Fi Technology To Load And Display Thousands Of Images

With sales of digital cameras now greater than conventional film cameras, a Silicon Valley start-up has launched the next step in the digital photo revolution. Wallflower Systems, Inc. of San Jose is now shipping the Wallflower, a beautifully crafted, 14 inch (diagonal measurement) electronic photo frame that uses WiFi connectivity and a hard drive to load, store and display thousands of high-quality images.

A "must have" gift for all types of photographers, from snapshot enthusiasts to serious hobbyists and professionals, the Wallflower works with a personal computer to quickly and easily create a photography show that can be elegantly displayed on a table, shelf or desk in the home or office. The easy-to-use software lets users compile photo albums on a PC or notebook, and then quickly transfer them to the Wallflower's built-in hard drive. Once loaded, pictures are displayed in rich, full-color on the 1024 x 768 pixel display. New images and updated display instructions are easily transferred via the WiFi (802.11b) wireless network connection, and there's no need for connecting cables or shuffling memory cards.

Wallflower Plus sports a 14.1 inch screen that supports 16.7 million colors, but that's not all that's new. It is also an MP3 Jukebox capable of storing thousands of songs then playing them back over the enclosed speakers or through your stereo by connecting it via analog or digital sound outputs. Wallflower Plus now also supports MPEG Video playback making it the most complete digital entertainment frame available.

Wallflower Plus also features our patent pending Pollinate technology that enables email delivery of photos to single or multiple remote Wallflowers. By assigning a unique email address to each Wallflower you can deliver photos to individual Wallflowers or to a series of systems. Families can deliver pictures of their newborn to their parents and siblings just by sending an email. The recipients don't have to do a thing as the Wallflower receives the message, places the photo in the image directory and starts showing it -- automatically.

Wallflower Plus comes complete with a USB port which supports USB jump drives and smart media adapters for uploading images and music even if you don't have a wireless network.

"The Wallflower combines two of today's most exciting technologies, digital imaging and WiFi, to make it easy for people to display and enjoy digital pictures," said Mitch Kahn, president and founder of Wallflower Systems. "All of us at Wallflower Systems were early adopters of digital photography, and we weren't satisfied with the cumbersome, small image size digital picture frames available to view finished photos outside of the PC screen. The response to our initial product shipments has been tremendous, showing us that artisan craftsmanship and design for usability still stand out in the digital age."

Using the Wallflower is easy. Once it is plugged in it automatically finds the local WiFi network. Users can simply drag and drop images into the Wallflower folder on the desktop using software that is built-in to Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. The Wallflower even automatically adjusts image size and creates letterboxes so images are optimized for the display size. Options such as image flip-time, portrait or landscape orientation, and album organization are changed through a web browser interface. Using an Internet-connected Wallflower, users can also share images with friends and family without costly monthly service fees.


analogZONE Says...

Besides being a really attractive and practical display for digital pictures, the Wallflower electronic picture frame is a great case study on the pros, cons, and challenges of using recycled electronics in a production environment. While they have had to make the inevitable compromises, the company has been making a deliberate effort to use recycled electronic components taken from older laptop computers wherever possible.

Before I get started, let me explain that the product I reviewed was the original Wallflower model which boasted a smaller, 11 inch screen, and a slightly-less user-friendly interface. But the new Wallflower Plus unit shares many of the same great features and from what I can tell, it's just as beautifully crafted. As you'll see, its recycled materials content is probably lower than the unit I reviewed, but even that is instructive for those of us trying to make a business case for electronics recycling.

The idea came for the Wallflower came from founder Mitch Kahn's experiences with the older Kodak digital picture frames. While exciting in concept, Kahn found the actual products to be less fun to use and not very pretty either. At around the same time he also noticed the sharp decrease in cost of LCDs and Wi-Fi products, and saw a possible market opening. Soon, he'd built a prototype out of a laptop as a way to speed development. It was only then that he realized that one of the cheapest ways to build a product like his was to actually use reclaimed laptops.

My experiences with the Wallflower were quite positive, both from an aesthetic and technical perspective. The wooden case it's housed in is handmade by local California artisans and looked quite at home among the antiques and paintings in my living room. Loading the Wallflower with 50-odd pictures (a small fraction of its actual capacity) from my computer and configuring it via the wireless interface was reasonably easy, although there were a few ambiguous places in the procedure that might trip up a non-computer user. Once the unit is set up and associated with your wireless network, you can upload, delete, and otherwise manage the pictures in the display from the comfort of your favorite computer. In the week or two that I had the unit set up in our living room, I updated the slide show several times to match my mood, or for the benefit of a particular friend who was coming to visit. My Mom was especially pleased to see a bunch of pictures of her favorite granddaughter greet her when she stopped over for dinner one night. Both friends and family said that the display was crisp and a joy to look at in the moderate light of my living room, although I suspect it might not perform as well in full-daylight environments.

I was truly sorry to have to pack up the Wallflower after having it in my living room for a couple of weeks. It was great to be able to take several hundred (and several thousand with the new unit) high-quality digital photos of our family's exploits and move them from the bowels of my computer and display them in an extremely attractive frame. While the somewhat steep price ($699 for the unit I tested, and $799-$999 for the newer models) means it will be a while before I buy one for myself, it's high on my wish list of toys. Beyond its appeal as a consumer play toy, I suspect that the Wallflower will also enjoy considerable popularity in commercial applications such as directories and displays for hotel lobbies, department stores, office complexes, and other public areas.

The only other minor issues I had with the unit were some slow responses between menu selections during set-up, and a slightly esoteric technique that's required to get the unit to associate with your Wi-Fi network. The latter had me wishing that there was a more straightforward way to hook up to the display through a wired port. Both wishes have been granted with the introduction of the Wallflower Plus unit, which boasts an improved user interface and a wired (USB) port as an alternate means of connection.

The unit I tested uses recycled parts from a popular HP laptop model, from which the screen, mother board, power supply and most electronics are scavenged. The one exception is the Wi-Fi interface that is added as a new PCMCIA plug-in. In the interest of speed disk space, and reliability, the Windows OS is scraped from the hard drive and replaced with a customized Linux system.

Kahn explained that one of the biggest challenges in designing the Wallflower for manufacture with recycled components was to support the use of components from several different models to ensure he'd have a steady supply chain .One of his more notable achievements in this area was to write a flexible software package that could run on a variety of platforms, and to make an enclosure that could accommodate differently-shaped electronics packages and displays. He solved the packaging problem by making a standard frame with an oversized cutout that would accommodate several differently-shaped laser-cut mounting plates that are custom cut on demand for a particular lot of materials. He found that this approach saves money in the long run, and is usually less expensive than buying components new -- even when each component is tested before inclusion in manufacturing. But since this sort of low-volume testing can be rather costly for him, he hopes that some of it can be pushed back onto an electronics recycler once volume is large enough to justify the initial investment in setting up high-volume test stations.

While production logistics force the new "Plus" model to be not quite as heavy in recycled content as the original, the manufacturer still hopes to keep the percentage at least 50%. While details were not fully ironed out when I talked with them late last year, they were pretty certain that they will use a new small form factor motherboard rather than salvaging a dead computer's guts, but the screen and its display electronics would be reclaimed from used laptops, along with whatever else they can find in sufficient quantity and quality to support trouble-free production. Kahn also noted that he would like to continue making the Wildflower "Classic" unit (which I tested) from recycled components if they can locate enough laptops.

Wallflower's experience with using recycled components can be instructive for the rest of the industry. While they found that used parts would be perfectly suitable for many applications, they had trouble finding them in sufficient quantities to support anticipated production volumes of 10s of thousands of units. One example of the kind of challenge they face here is that their hard drives will have to be new for the moment, simply because it's hard to find enough of the same kind of unit, and to get them tested for reliability at a cost that's competitive with buying new.

While this shortage may be a temporary stumbling block for a manufacturer who aspires to the cost savings and environmental benefits of using recycled components, it is also a sign of a tremendous opportunity for the enterprising recycler. Given his interests in such matters, I suspect that Mr. Kahn would be more than happy to share his insights on using recycled components with both recyclers and other manufacturers interested in beginning to "close the loop" on the production cycle.

Wallflower digital picture frames are handcrafted and come in a variety of finishes, ranging from light maple to dark cherry and black and are priced from $799-$999, depending on style, finish, and options. Frames can be ordered online.

Lee's Saltshaker Rating

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