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Homemade Digital Picture Frames?
kato writes: "I've been searching for months for the right parts to make a digital picture frame for my wall. I'm not trying to mount an entire PC in a frame, so I think an old laptop would be overkill. I've heard about devices such as the Audrey made by 3COM, the AOL Touchpad made by Gateway, the Cieva picture frame, and a few others, but each has its faults. Some are impossible to find, some require a service, and some aren't yet "hacked." I'd like the price to be cheap (under $100), the picture to be about 10" diagonally, and to be able to connect to the device (modem or network). Now that the MIT flea market is over, I'm stuck trying to find the parts online. I'm leaning towards the AOL Touchpad, which runs Mobile Linux, but no one has posted any attempts on how to get rid of AOL. Anyone have any ideas or success stories?" An earlier question pointed out this site, but I suppose buying one would take all the fun out of it. You also need to watch out for "subscription to our service required" frames...
the product linked ins't helpful -- it costs $500 when our target is under $100. story research, la la la.
deceptakahn
the aol/gateway deal has been hacked
U lt raBoard.pl?Action=ShowBoard&Board=aolgw&Idle=&Sort =&Order=&Session=
and you can find instructions in the forums on linux-hacker.com
more specificaly
http://www.linux-hacker.net/cgi-bin/UltraBoard/
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
An LCD display has 'lighted' light regions and the dark regions are actually dark (not lit from behind). This is the best of both worlds which is why LCDs have the highest light-to-dark ratio (250-1) and make for the best photo display terminals.
Be very wary of cheaper LCDs. They tend to fade after a while.
Keeping
For that kind of money you can't even buy a raw LCD panel, probably not even used. Your best bet is to buy an old laptop. The old NEC versa laptops had reversible screens so you could flip the screen around and face it outwards making it fairly trivial to disguise the keyboard. You are really going to have a hard time beating an old laptop for price/performance. The only other thing I can think of in your price range would be a second video card and a small color TV or used RGB monitor and either one of those is going to be a challenge to disguise (if you are after that 'picture frame' look). The color TV is easier as you can use standard coax cable and off the shelf amplifiers for long cable runs. I suppose you could also use one of those wireless video devices but the quality on those things pretty much sucks, although at smaller screen sizes it may be ok.
I have my Audrey working as a picture frame right now and its pretty good, I just have to figure out how to stop the thing from timeing out and shutting itself off!
Sometimes you can get those as cheap as $20 if you find one at a thrift store/surplus PC store... Upon analysis of my existing laptop (when I was fixing the display), it wouldbe fairly simply to remove the panel completely, replace the connector (which is basically a bundle of wires in shrinkwrap) with slightly longer cabling, and flip the display over so it faces away from the laptop when closed, add a mounting point on the back for hanging, and you've got a digital picture frame for less than $30 total... Install Windows 3.11 or Linux and you're good to go...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Hmm... Hack a 99$ I-opener. Connect it as an ftp server, and have it ftp to a directory used by one of those ever popular picture-displaying screen savers. Mount the moniter on the wall, mount the box in a closet or with the rest fo the servers in your house, problem solved. (for I-opener info, visit linux-hacker.org)
. ht ml (too lazy to html at this time of morning)
If you get tired of cutting holes in the wall (and who doesn't?) there is a less geeky solution. Just buy one. Kensington has out a 640x480 7" solution that is in the 150 range. The USB connection won't let you remotely manage your photograph collection from a motel in kenya, but this will actually work and with minimal effort.
http://shop.store.yahoo.com/cfarr/kendigphotal1
The ______ Agenda
eio has a few alternatives towards the bottom of the page (starting with the 5L-U4E). They range from $99 to $350 in with sizes 5", 6", and 12" available. Most of these accept an NTSC signal, so you could interface one with a cheap PC fairly easily. Unfortunately, all the color displays appear to be sold out right now. With a little bit of digging, you might be able to find another supplier of the same or similar products, or they might get more in stock sometime.
:-). With a little bit of php/perl/asp/etc programming, you could make a very flexible (with respect to image size, delay between images, etc) solution that could behave exactly how you want.
Also, Lik-sang has both a 5" and 7" LCD display for $99 and $199 respectively. The 5" is a PS One display that accepts NTSC/PAL, and the 7" is a more standard NTSC/PAL display. The latter has additional features like an screen orientation flip (so you can mount it however you like), speakers, and a battery slot. This would probably be my choice for this type of project.
Don't disregard the 3Com Audrey, however. You wouldn't even have to hack the thing to get it running as a picture frame. Just plug it into your network and use the browser to display the images from another server that is doing all the work. The browser has a full screen mode that is pretty well suited for this. I should know because one of mine was displaying a pr0n slideshow for a while
3Com's Audrey is about $80 from http://tigerdirect.com and, from what I've heard, are easily hacked. You can even get a ethernet adapter so that you could even send the pictures through your network.
The company's url is:
http://www.eink.com
the pun is mightier than the sword
Buy a Ceiva for $99 after rebate and hack it or not.
GET AN I-OPENER. I ordered one after reading some slashdot about it, and it was about $140 + $80 for the hard drive, other mods. Right now their like $85 with HDD on e-bay. An i-opener is a full-fledged computer (internet device) minus HDD. Like, 32m ram, 233mhz, 12" screen, all in one. with a stand. but you could remove the stand and screw it into the wall if you want. Definitely the I-Opener is your best choice. I've got one, but it's not a frame yet. You might also try the Ricoh 1200S, or whatever, that's a 10.4" touchscreen (i got one of those too).
Good luck,
-Rob
I bought a ceiva for my parents. The thing that made it attractive as the gift for them was specifically that thing which most slashdotters hate about it. The service, or more precisely, the way the service works--no end user interaction required.
As for viewing angle and picture quality, I thought they were both more than satisfactory. Most of the time, when you are looking at a picture--not because you are passing it by on somebody's desk, but because you actually want to see the picture--you look at it fairly straight on.
Exceptions would be if several people were looking at it at the same time, creating a small crowd around the picture. And this is a very reasonable thing to worry about. But I tried out the picture frame for a couple days before I sent it to my parents. I viewed it from different angles. Yeah, it did get dimmer and dimmer the more severe the angle, but it was still viewable and satisfactory at angles of 30-40 degrees.
This isn't a projection of a newspaper or something, it's a picture. A picture of a dog is still recognizable, even if a little dimmer, at various viewing angles on the ceiva.
I can just imagine some neurotic slashdotter checking out a ceiva at bestbuy or wherever. They'd hold a ceiva to a wall, and with their face pressed against the wall, complain in a muffled voice that the picture quality sucked at a 90 degree angle.
For a course at my college a few years ago, a group of us decided to build a digital picture frame. We wanted to build something similar to what you are describing. I hope my experience can help.
We built it from scratch -- no PC or handheld -- since we wanted it to be cheap, small, and portable. As the processor, we used a BasicX microcontroller. You program it in a language similar to BASIC -- very easy to pick up -- and it stores the code in EEPROM so that you can make changes at will. It also has a serial port (use a null-modem cable -- this is how you put the code on it) so you can use that for input/output when it is running independently to add/remove pictures, etc. The BasicX controller isn't the most stable thing in the world (nor the fastest) -- but it's great for quick + dirty development.
We used a cheap, nondescript, color 6" LCD, but had major problems trying to get it to sync correctly. The documentation was too scarce -- make sure you get lots of current docs on your LCD of choice. Perhaps the speed limitations of the BasicX controller had something to do with it (I think the minimum instruction execution time is around 1 us -- more for serial port accessing).
For storage, we tried to get a flash memory reader/writer, since the BasicX EEPROM was not sufficient. We wanted it to have lots of static memory that was also portable. (Perhaps not the greatest idea.) We couldn't find anything that was good for development purposes -- just end-user PC-compatible reader/writers. I recommend trying to find cheap, slow computer memory. This is possibly the most difficult part of the supplies -- finding static memory at a decent price.
Pricing was as follows:
BasicX Development Station: $140
Used, generic, unknown color LCD: $300
Flash memory reader/writer: $80
32MB Flash card: $50 (it was a few years ago)
Total: around $400
We also wanted to use a USB controller for reading/writing to memory -- bad idea. It cost us a lot of time and money.
Hope this helps,
Josh
I do not agree with you (I own an audrey) and like a growing and active community we think this gizmo can have a second live for hobbyist... but yes, +400 USD was too expensive (I bought mine from tiger direct at 89 plus custom as I live in Europe) and if I had the chance I would love to buy 3 or 4 more but they do not sale them anymore...
I have an Audrey that I picked up off EBay for $80. With the hacks from the Audrey Hacking site, it has been updated to the latest firmware. Using the pictureframe module from Misterhouse I not only have X10 control of my house accessible from the Audrey, but also as a digital pictureframe when idle. The Audrey also has a high Spouse Acceptibility Factor and looks great when you put three or four around the house. Get the additional supported 3Com 3C19250 USB Ethernet adaptor if you have broadband and it works great as an instant-on fast internet appliance.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
As you can see, connecting this to a VGA output is more complex than just wiring the right LCD pin to the right VGA pin. You can probably use something like an AVR or fast PIC or a small CPLD to spit out an image from RAM, though (like this, for example). Then you need some way for your host computer to put data into that RAM. RS232, ethernet, or USB would all be reasonably easy to do.
If your panel has more controllerage attached, though, all bets are off --- it may be imitating a VGA monitor, it may be imitating an ISA video card, or it may be providing some private proprietary interface to whatever device it used to be attached to...