Home Depot employee info kiosk modded to play Nyan Cat
Channel: Ned Scott
Date: 2014-03-16

(now public! 3/16/14) So back when I worked at Home Depot, they had this little "benefits" info screen thing back in the employee breakroom. It's basically a mass produced kiosk made from a digital photo frame in a cardboard case that they can pin up to the wall, with buttons, and an SD card that management would update every so often with videos that played when you pressed one of the buttons. The idea was that employees would could press a button on a given topic and get information about it. Obviously, these short little videos were totally useless, but for some reason... there it was.

One day I had my laptop with me, and whenever that happens I take it into the breakroom at the store, rather than leave it in my car. I decided to take a look at the SD card and saw that it was just a basic exfat SD card with five AVI video files, labeled "1.avi, 2.avi" etc. So that night I went to youtube, grabbed your standard Nyan Cat loop video (I forget how long it was, but I should have tried to make it as long as possible), and loaded it up to my laptop. 

The next day I brought my laptop back into the breakroom for "safe keeping" and copied the Nyan Cat video over one of the included videos on the Home Depot SD card. Now when you pressed on the button for "health benefits" people were treated to a delightful rendition of Nyan Cat.

It didn't take long for the entire store to hear about this, most of them being a little bit older and having never heard of Nyan Cat before. Most everyone knew I had been the one who did this (being the "that techy guy", but somehow no one mentioned it to management when they asked who the heck had changed it. I don't think they knew right away how to take it off. It stayed that way for several months, and only when they had new videos to put on did the Nyan Cat video get replaced.

Now that I no longer work at Home Depot I can finally make this video public.

At another time, around Christmas, I did a similar thing to a more basic photo frame that played a looping video for an in-store display on flooring, but only on that one day. Since it was close to Christmas, I had loaded up "Home Alone" to play on a loop.

If you ever come across one of these in a store, they're almost always just some kind of mass produced digital photo frame with accessible SD slots and USB ports. If you have a memory card you don't mind parting with, or a method of copying a file over, putting some strange video on one can help pass the time at an otherwise uneventful job.