Homemade LCD Digital Picture Frame

[garreh]

Hey guys

I wondered if anyone has ever attemtped to create a cheap LCD Picture Frame?

Bit like this guy has....

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/how20/a4a95ad...ecbccdrcrd.html

I think it would be quite a cool challenge for the hak.5 crew to do. Try and make the slimest, most feature-rich (allow pictures to come from many sources usb sticks, sd/xd memory cards, etc) and to it as cheaply possible! :)

Watcha think?

[deleted]

It would be VERRY difficult to make a Slim and Feature Rich device on the Cheap.

1. Company's Spend Thousands making Circuit Boards as small as Possible.

2. The More Features there are the Bigger it is

3. Slots for Memory Cards take up space and They also need Driver Boards.

I still Think this Would be very cool.

[VaKo]

You could do something with a Via pico-itx and a 10" touch screen, although you could go much larger screen wise and use one of those Edwardian heavy gilded frames, which would give you plenty of room for the electronics behind the image.

[moonlit]

You could do something with a Via pico-itx and a 10" touch screen, although you could go much larger screen wise and use one of those Edwardian heavy gilded frames, which would give you plenty of room for the electronics behind the image.

That would be an interesting thing with the big frame, could be an interesting project and would look awesome. Expensive, but cool.

I've thought about this a bunch of times, I've got a PII laptop that could use this treatment, but it has an integrated power brick... Still, if I do anything with it I'll post. :D

Tried once before but I killed the laptop before getting anywhere... :(

[metatron]

I was listening to Episode 33 and heard the call in from the guy who is taking old laptops and making digital picture frames from them. I have made about 10 of them from old Sony laptops. I use Gentoo with level three install (Although at level 2 or one could be used, but not as easy to setup). No X, just basic command line and use the frame buffer with fbi to do the slideshow. I can get away with running this with 64 Megs of ram and the hard drives are generally 2 GB and up. If I take it down to 32 Megs of ram, the hard drive starts grinding away while showing the slideshow. No doubt having to do some swapping. I have also installed OpenSSH, Apache (for someday having webpage editing and control of the photos), Wireless card drivers, Samba, and LIRC (I have a few frames that I used the remote from the Sandisk Photo Viewer on). The laptops I use are usually 1.66Mhz Sony PCG-707s with a 13 inch screen. I usualy get them for less than $100 on Ebay. (If any of you bid on one, let me know, so I don't bid against you :-) I want to add some features to where the frame could download photos from my home server, or an online site I can upload to. I haven't gotten that far with it yet. I would like to have a whole set of the frames looking at the same source for their photos. I have written and modified someone elses shell scripts to look for a USB stick, CD Rom or PCMCIA Flash card inserted and automatically copying the photos to a location and restarting the slideshow.

Here are some photos I put on Flickr of some of the frames and the building process:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/69225117@N00/

Russell

I’ve been using CRUX in all my picture frames. It’s super lightweight and with a little work I managed to get it to get the photos via WI-FI, as well as dump the contents of any connected flash drive to the internal hard drive and then add them to the play list.

Cheapest way to do it is with an old laptop, P2/P3’s are fine. If you want slimline it’s cheaper to buy them, unless you’re looking for a big screen and if that is the case you may as well go back to using a laptop as it’s going to be smaller then using an computer display/components .