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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}
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.)
Well, there's a few problems with that approach. Number one, ink cartidges ain't cheap (and could, after a while, add up to more than the cost of a device). Second, you lose the ability to cycle through pictures on the fly.
I may just be a wierdo for thinking so, but a big advantage of the digital device would be the ability to incorporate it into some "instant room theming" system. Perhaps coding dynamic theming apps has just gone to my head, but I think it'd be cool.
Besides, we already know how to click "File -> Print -> Ok", but the fun is in the hackery of something to suit our own purposes. I could buy pre-built Lego models too, but that wouldn't be very nifty.
The draw? Simple. I bought one as a Christmas gift for my parents. I upload pictures of my kids, and every few days they wake up to some new images. They don't need to think about it at all. They have a computer, but there's no way they'd ever get comfortable with the process of downloading an image and printing it, no matter how simple that seems.
The Ceiva is an OK solution. I haven't found any hacks for it. Their service is nothing special, but functional.
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.
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
You make a good point there. The price/performance ration isn't terribly good at the moment for this sort of thing in general.
The Gyricon system looks extremely cool! Of course, I'd want the "paper" to be re-writable more than a few thousand times (to allow for fun stuff like streaming MPEG movies, so I wouldn't burn out my display in a few seconds
Now, there is always the possibility of checking around with local hospital systems for "old hardware" that they're tossing out. A couple of years ago, I managed to secure two 21" monitors and a couple of decent PCs from a hospital that had decided the hardware was "obsolete". True, they really ought to have been giving the stuff away to charity of educational insititutions, but they were literally thowing the monitors in the dumpster. Now, I just need to carve up my wall with a saw...
Second, you lose the ability to cycle through pictures on the fly.
Well, you could put the pictures in page protectors, and then assemble a set in a three ring binder. Tape the binder to the wall, put all the pages at the top, and you'll cycle through the pictures. Adjusting the friction with some tape allows you to adjust the cycle speed. Benefits;
1. No external electrical power requirements
2. Puting pictures back to back in the page protectors allows 2 pics to be viewed at once.
3. When a picture of your ex scrolls throw that you forgot to pull, you can throw a dart at it w/o worrying about breaking an expensive LCD screen.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
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 $30 total... Install Windows 3.11 or Linux and you're good to go...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Hmm... Hack a 99$ 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
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"
The company's url is:
http://www.eink.com
the pun is mightier than the sword
Shouldn't a grammar nazi know the difference between a ratio and a ration? Anyways, his comment seems to be bunk. A high quality photograph or print can be both very reflective and very absorbant (light-wise).
Besides, pictures look different on all of todays monitors because the colors and brightness of the phosphors (or LCD pixel) can vary a lot. I don't care to guess about the output of a cheap color printer, but I know that print shops can put out a much greater range of color than a computer screen.
Grumble, Grumble
Hey,
/.ers ever had girls visiting thier homes.
I may just be a wierdo for thinking so, but a big advantage of the digital device would be the ability to incorporate it into some "instant room theming" system.
Yeah. You could have a touchscreen inside your front door, so if you bring a girl home, all your porn posters are replaced by tastful modern art. That'd be useful.
Well, it would be useful if any
On a serious note, It'd be cool if you could hack your picture frames to show streaming media (some use Linux and ethernet, no?) then you could have a TV input card on a computer, and if you went to the kitchen to get a snack, you wouldn't have to miss the program.
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Buy a Ceiva for $99 after rebate and hack it or not.
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 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."