Jailbreaking a cheap Frameo photo frame (Bigasuo 15.6”) to show a Home Assistant dashboard

By Tim on October 13, 2026 7 min read.

After my last post about turning old iPads into photo frames, I had a different itch to scratch. I wanted a cheap wall-mounted screen that shows a live Home Assistant dashboard rather than photos. I bought a Bigasuo 15.6” digital photo frame which seemed to have a good size, good resolution and touch screen for about £104 - one of the generic “Frameo” white-label frames readily available online - and figured I could repurpose it rather than buy a proper smart display.

How hard could it be? I did see some evidence of people having success with similar frames in Reddit - but also several who said they’d returned a frame because they couldn’t get into it.

Turns out: quite hard. But also a genuinely interesting rabbit hole.

Caveat: I heavily leant on Claude Code to help me do this. I did not have (m)any of the necessary skills to do th...

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Turning old unused iPads into photo frames

By Tim on May 18, 2025 6 min read.

I’ve always liked having a dynamic photo frame at home which shows off a selection of recent photos.

We take a lot of photos these days and it feels like showing them off in a nice photo frame is a nice way to enjoy them.

I’ve had various flavours of this over the years. Sadly the pace at which technology changes is often the reason why a perfectly good working solution stops working! And that’s the reason for this post.

I suspect that most people who want to do this buy a custom made photo frame. And either feed it with a USB stick of photos and are happy to manually update them every now and again. Or are happy to pay a subscription for a service to integrate with their online photos.

My requirements are:

  • Recent photos are automatically displayed on the photo frame shortly after taking

  • Photos could be a mixture of “old special photos” and more recently taken ones

  • No subsc...

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