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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}
I never understood the draw for digital picture frames. When they're GIVING away photo quality printers with computer purchases and a full resolution printout amortises to about $2 a page, the only thing that DPF gives you is a wipe to another picture...and a power reuirement.
Buy a $60 dollar printer, and when the cartridges dry up, pitch it. You're out less money, and the pictures work everywhere but in the dark. (Okay, TWO benefits to a digital picture frame.)
Pick the right paper, and the photos will last a heckuva lot longer than the DPF will.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Sure not quite what you were after, but you would get a large picture at a relatively low cost.
I just finished hacking my I-Opener that I bought on ebay (for 50 dollars) and I think it would be pretty plausible. Actually, I was thinking of surrounding the border with a frame and putting it up on the wall like a picture frame.
This doesn't answer the question at all, but what would be really cool is some kind of digital display that, once the display is set, doesn't require any power. You could plug it in to your computer, download a picture, then unplug it and put it on your desk, wall, whatever. I'd pay $100 for that!
Is there any such technology out there that does this -- some kind of persistent, no- or low-power display?
Yeah, for all you wise-akers out there, I know you can do the same thing with paper and a printer, but paper ceased to be cool about 2000 years ago.
but what about some system where you pipe the image itself (not a digital representation thereof) directly over fiber optic cable to be rear projected onto a surface of your choosing?
It seems to me this device would consist of a unit to first convert the signal from any generic PC video card to its "analog" image form, then boost the image amplification, and send it down the cable. The receiving unit would take the image coming in off the cable, perform any desired magnification or whatever, and project it onto a glass surface.
I am not an optics expert AT ALL. It just seems like this might have some potential for looking into.
I have long been waiting for the day when I can have literally wall-to-wall lcd (or whatever flat display is in at the time).
/. interactive poster (if I could afford the million dollar subscription for it... ("Dude! Your poster's expired!")).
I think texture-mapping your walls would be a lot cooler than wallpapering them- and less messy too! How long would it be before there was a "wood-chip" module where you could scratch the chips off like people annoyingly do after you've painted it?
Also I could mince around the room all day dragging my posters to different locations...
Imagine! No more agonizing in the shop over which clock, calander etc to buy- just run the applet of your choice!
Then there would be the
Actually I think makers of posters, art prints etc. would start getting aggressive when they found the "mp3" effect was hitting them.
Anyway, thanks for listening to my silly girlish fantasy, and now you can all reply with your lame jokes about "Windows for walls" (Any colour you like as long as it's blue....) etc.
graspee
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!
it seems a bit of a pipe dream because the prices of LCD's seem quite high for you
(although for a full monitor they ARE LOW buy now is my advice)
I know that 1024x768 is about £300 (~$765 acording to pricewatch)
BUT what about differant form factor how much do these cost and how about getting it from friendly electronics store (just bare screen no enclosure ) I dont know
anyone have any clue ?
regards
john jones
Hmm... Hack a 99$ 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
This isn't 100% relevant to making a photo frame, but I also don't think it warrants an entire thread of its own. So here's a supplementary question from me: Has anyone successfully hacked a laptop's TFT screen for use with other devices?
:)
Id est, have you successfully 'ripped' the screen from the laptop and interfaced it with stuff like an ordinary VGA, something that outputs video, pictures, whatever?
I'm trying to find more information on that. I have a couple of old laptops that can barely run X, and since I'm integrating a PC into my car, I thought it'd be nice to rip the TFT off of one and use it for in-car output. In the past, I've replaced some cabling connecting the laptop's on-board VGA card to the TFT screen and the entire system looked very weird to me. But I'm assuming it can be done, if the pinouts can be tracked down. Or I could be way off track
If anybody with more experience on this could point me to the right direction, I'd appreciate it.
So long, and thanks for all the fish
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
First off, outstanding job with that setup. I think that's a setup most of us would like to have in our pads.
My only worry is the security of the whole thing. Consider the following scenarios:
Note to moderators: yes, it was supposed to be funny
1.) Buy Audrey
2.) Open browser on audrey and point it to cgi-script on a box on network
3.) Make Browser full screen
4.) Have cgi script display an image, wait a few seconds and reload.
Usually there is cost vs perceived benefit. Why would anyone want a computer, for example? and indeed, only people with a high end need for the advantadges would be early adopters.
All you need is to go to someplace like vintagecomputerads.com to apreciate the costs of the machines vs the benefits. For many folks, the costs in money and learning curve were not sensible.
Now the arguments of the media lasting long are valid, and I cannot imagine that these things are going to be cheap yet.
The side effect of all of this is the walking into the loss of material over time as things get lost and purged. No more going through old drawers and finding childhood pictures long forgotten. A floppy disk found in a desert cave would be unreadle, unlike the Dead Sea Scrolls.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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.
Or you could pay a high end photo place to make you slides, and put them in a cheap slide projector.
Soccer Goal Plans
Kensington has US$79 for 5.7" diagonal screen; 320 X 240 resolution and US$149 for 7.4" diagonal screen, 640 X 480 resolution.
It says they're out of stock though, so I don't know if this deal is still available.
Buy a Ceiva for $99 after rebate and hack it or not.
A couple of weeks ago, I had an idea similar to this. What I wanted was a device that had a 7" display that could act like a portable digital photo album.
My girlfriend likes to take pictures. She's not keen on getting a digital camera because she doesn't want to have to look at the pictures with a computer (let's put the printer conversation aside).
I figured that if she had a device that she could take with her, slide in a disc with the actual pictures on it, then she can browse the pictures away from her computer. So the theory is that she'd use her computer to compile albums on some form of disc (or something similar). These digital albums could then be taken and viewed using a portable device designed to input one of these discs, and display the photos on a 7" screen.
These digital frames are 1/2 way there.
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
First, I'd want a high resolution to view the photos that I've scanned in. Some of these hit 1600x1280 quite easily. It need not be in pixels, but I'd want to have the density like IBM's high-end panels
Thin. I would want this to be no thicker than a regular picture in a frame.
Connections should either be wireless networking with batteries, or physical connections in the rear coming up though the wall.
Internal HD to store images. Some old IBM laptop.
Integration into a smart house network - so it is possible to change from 'Dogs Playing Poker' to 'Water Lilies' when a date shows up. Also support for standard video signals (TV) would be nice.
Humm... Too bad the bulbs in the LCD projectors don't last more than 200 hours, otherwise I'd suggest using one of those.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
A couple of years ago, I upgraded my PowerBook, and had the old machine spare. It's a PowerBook 5300c - a decent CPU and TFT display, but rather low-end for development...
So I took it out of its case, placed the motherboard on the back of the LCD, bought a cheap ($10) picture frame with a custom-cut border and put them together.
At the time my house had Ethernet in the walls, so I punched a hole in the wall, and put the machine on my network. Power and net were hidden, and the machine worked great. I wrote a quick app that displayed images from my collection. A wonderful way to show digital photographs you've taken.
Total cost was about $30 - I had no other use for the 5300. You could pick up a cheap laptop on eBay for $100-$200 if you don't have a spare. Bear in mind that displaying JPEGs is a very low-end task. All you really need is a decent TFT display and a network connection. Local hard disc is nice but not required.
Great fun to do, too.
I still have this working in my new house, but it now has an Airport card so I only need to wire in the power supply. This makes it easier to move it around and means I don't have to run Ethernet everywhere.
Sailing over the event horizon
I'm suprised no one has mentioned the webplayer yet.. I picked up a couple in a co-op buy last winter and just now got around to hacking it (hows that for procrastination?) - You can pick them up at ubid or ebay for around $100 - There's a great webplayer hacking forum here and it's easy to hook up to a USB ethernet connection..
air and light and time and space
So use a modified and rounded UDMA 66-100 cable, those are specially built for just that problem, just replace the connectors and remove the strands you don't need from the cable...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Thinkpad 560 = 16-bit TFT 800x600 color ultra-thin machine with an early Pentium and up to 40MB RAM using standard EDO SODIMMs.
Easy... Get ahold of one, disconnect the hinges, flip, glue, encase the whole thing in a thin wooden box, get some solid state storage on the order of 128MB or so for the PCMCIA slot, set the BIOS to boot from it, cheap NE2k for the other PCMCIA slot, install minimal Linux+X+ftp server and a script to just cycle all of the images in the incoming ftp directory.
Plug into network and power and hang on wall. 12.1" digital picture frame, total cost $100 or so, provided you get a good deal on the 560. I got mine for $150 but that was about a year ago now so depreciation is where I get the $100 figure... Beware that the backlights can fail from being on forever and ever and they're a pain to replace [tip -- if one blows on you, don't bother, just shop e-bay for a whole new 12.1" panel with backlight included, they're fairly cheap that way].
Good luck.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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."