The Piecemaker is an awesome opensource alternative to cu3er slider,
on Jan 1st 2011 the developers released version 2, which also has a wp plugin and adds the functionabilty of shortcodes in pages to inserted the slider.

See here:
http://www.modularweb.net/#/en/piecemaker/piecemaker-demo

However there is no defined way of inserting it outside the wordpress loop into a page template or theme files.

This project is to find a means of creating a template tag for the plugin.