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Build Your Own LCD Picture Frame
mbrain writes "PopSci is running a really good how-to story that shows how to build your own LCD picture frame. Since you are building it yourself, you can make it any size you like, using an off-the-shelf LCD monitor as the display. The frame as described uses a cheap motherboard, power supply and HD and runs Linux. It can hold thousands of photos. A little pricey, but still a cool project (especially if you have some of the parts laying around)."
This is very similar to a Mini-ITX project I saw a while ago.
The main difference is, the Mini-ITX page shows you how everything is layed out inside the picture frame.
...don't question it!!!
That is so over the top. Creating an entire PC just to show a picture? That's 200 for the screen and another 200 for the computer. On top of that they are recommending a hard disk?
My version uses a 5 quid FPGA and some junk thrown away equipment. The LCD was a 12" 9bit colour from some factory and a fiend of a friend offered them to us for a quid each. And the RAM is an old 1Mb 30simm (I have about 3kg of these). There you go. A picture displaying system with no need for a huge/noisy PC power supply (runs from one of those 12v ac/dc plug converters). The images can be sent to it via a serial cable (two wires internally so it can be passed over any old cable you have lying around).
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
I hope to surround myself with LCD walls and change my room based on my mood.
Open form-factor laptop specification.
I *can't* believe that companies like Viewsonic and Asus have not gotten together to create a chassis and DC power spec so that we can all build/repair our own laptops. Things like LCD panels could be purchased affordably at Best Buy or Circuit Shitty if this was the case.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Pete, Repeat, and Ditto... At least it is semi-interesting.
Also, this is a good use for those old 486/low end pentium laptops too... keep trying to get some to work on for the VPA dept. at work.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
can be found here.
Yeah I'm almost certain we all have a few unused LCD monitors lying around..
Right over there in the corner with my old 486's.
I guess the reason for doing this would ahve to be the coolness factor of it and rolling it yourself. But when you realize it is going to cost you $500+ for the "coolness factor" and you see there are cheaper already built alternatives out there for less than half the cost why not buy a prebuilt one? None of your family cares what your picture frame runs on or your picture frames uptime FYI
Just find yourself an old broken laptop nobody wants and use its screen. That's what I used in a similar project, a Compaq Presario 1655 13.3" LCD screen :-D
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
Man, you're hard on your friends!
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
I did something similar to this but i just bought an old PII/300 laptop with a 15" screen... got the whole deal for $350 and then only cost me ~$50 for frame materials. On the whole was a lot more simplistic than trying to get all the parts together like this guy did, and as a plus i could get everything running while the laptop was still intact.
drunk chemists
These could be cool - imagine the possiblities - you have one hard disk with the family photos on and one with the porn.
When the family come round show the nice xmas pictures of you and that jumper you didn't want then when they go a simple swap of disks and it'll be like the Playboy mansion....
At least it's got to be better than looking at fish all day right?
I just read this article in the physical magazine about 20 minutes before this appeared. The finished product is a little bit thick to look good, and how do you hide the power cord?
You should at least boot if from a Compact Flash card
silent, no heat, droppable (kinda)
I've got no references for Linux but FreeBSD has a sectionin the Handbook
And my fellow 9fan Matthias showed me a handy reference guide and bunch of scripts for the binaries you want. Well that's for non-X, my next stage of my project is trying to get my EPIA working in SVGA mode or, if I get a big enough CF card (I think a 256Mb should work and they are about $50 on ebay). I'm trying for an in car system. I already got it playing mp3s from the CD Rom 35 seconds from power.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Hey, there's nothing like converting a low-res display and computer hardware to make a high-tech $300+ version of a $10 picture frame.
Could you use a LCD from a notebook for this, or would it be too proprietary?
My old Dell Latitude died a few months back. I used to display some professional photos I'd taken on it, and the thought came to me that I could use the LCD in this same fashion. But I realized it probably wouldn't be feasible (at least for someone of my expertise).
A special project for Bill Gates wannabes?
Free Firefox news reader.
you can make it any size you like, using an off-the-shelf LCD monitor as the display.
So, I want the display to be, say, 10" diagonal, with frame 11", yeah, I go and buy such a display (where?) or get a ready one and cut it to the right dimensions?
You are pretty much stuck with the display size and you can only obscure it or extend the frame. You are stuck with factory display sizes.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Wargoatseing, anyone?
Hate me!
my lord this is a retarded plan. I see absolutely zero advantage in doing it this way, what overkill! I'd be impressed if it ran off a chip or something senseable, but this is just way too much work. you can get jpg decoders on a chip, I'd be impressed if you made this out of a digital camera (just switch the LCD to a bigger one). but this is just "buy a computer, glue it to the wall"
-You're wasting your time. Alfador only likes me.
At the prices + time you're looking at with a project like this, you might as well go out and buy one.
e .asp
http://www.artpix.com/
http://www.pacificdigital.com/products/memoryfram
This project is only economical if you have old laptops sitting around. If that's the case, you probably won't have enough CPU/RAM to install the latest version of debian. For me, I don't even have a hard drive.
Anyone found a lite solution to picture frame software? Here are two solutions that I've found so far:
PictureFrame Linux
- Too heavy on system requirements
DOS Solution
I did this about two years ago using a Websurfer (about $50) and a old small HD with DOS and a batch script, for my mom's TV.
The I-Opener ($40 now) can do the same thing. See http://www.linux-hacker.net/ they have a real good forum about this sort of stuff.
James Earl Jones like voice:
Mini-ITX motherboard 150
Custom 3 inch deep fram 100
Penium II desktop 100
USB CD-ROM 30
USB Wireless Adapter 80
15 inch LCD 300
RadioShack Switch 7
Power Brick 60
100 Hours you should
have been at work
1 60000year job
Getting the same result for 827 as you would for a $300 digital picture frame: Priceless Fade to black
Now I don't need to keep changing the pr0n on my wall...
It doesn't cost 400 quid to put together an LCD picture frame. PopSci is taking a different route from Linux Toys, which starts with a $50 laptop from eBay. This has also been reviewed on Slashdot. While I like PopSci's mini ATX method, the Linux Toys laptop method is usually cheaper, if you shop eBay carefully, and refer to Linux On Laptops to make sure it'll work.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Check these links for a Duo (Laptop) mod to a picture frame. I remember this site as the first I saw. I have an old 486 and a 64MB compaq flash just waiting for a conversion.
m e
http://www.applefritter.com/hacks/duodigitalfra
http://www.applefritter.com/node/view/728
Duo Digital Frame by James Roos
If all you want is an lcd picture frame, you can set one up very easily with an I-Opener for under $50. The guy's stuff is way overkill.
Put in a tiny camera and have a portrait image with eyes that follow the viewer. That would be pretty creepy. Or add some speakers, and and have it "jump out and scream" at the viewer when they get close, like those trick images on the web.
- Eric, InvisibleRobot.com
I agree, but you're missing most of the point- it's not the hardware, it's the concept; low-tech is best.
Please help metamoderate.
"My first project was to give the frame a wireless connection so I could transfer new pictures without taking it off the wall."
Oh great, then it'll start showing net-based advertisements. And if you add a passive infrared detector you will get double payback when people are in the room while an ad is being shown.
Possibly they use the same signalling as in a DVI interface but this is hardly a given. If you can figure out to connect wich wires to wich bits on the ribbon cord then you are sorted.
It wouldn't be hard to do provided someone else done it already and put it online.
And what are you going to loose? A screen on a dead laptop and perhaps an old vidcard. Not exactly staggering losses (althought as said above you probably need a dvi capable vidcard)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Before transferring your pictures to the frame, you may want to use a graphics program like Photoshop to resize all your pictures to the monitor's native resolution. That will save a little CPU power and a lot of hard drive space.
I don't know what photoshop is, but I know that the best program for task described above is a batch job running convert.
hey, I just checked that photoshop is not a linux program, why this guy is talking about non-linux programs?
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
"especially if you have some of the parts laying around"
ahhh yes.... Let me grab one of my old discarded LCD monitors I have so many of....
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Crossover Office.
Just using the computer to show pictures is probably a waste of money. But since you have a fully functional computer behind the picture there are lots of interesting and useful things that could be done by adding a few buttons to the frame, a touchscreen for the wealthy, or even an infared remote. With an internet connection it could cache the latest weather map for your area or traffic conditions. Add a server backend and run mythtv through it. Use it as a security monitor for the front door. When you don't want to use the other custom functions it would simply be a nicely framed picture on your wall. Thinking of it as intelligent art work that you could program makes it an interesting project.
Add a wind-machine and you could have your own VR sky diving simulator.
PowerBook 100 Monochrome Frame
PowerBook 540c Colour Frame
Mod Parent Up ... if you're going to make a photo frame out of a computer you might as well add something non trivil to it.
This is probably the worst article I've seen posted on making digital picture frames. I apologize if that hurts anyone's feelings, but a lot more thinking could have gone into the design and parts.
For starters, why not go to the flea market or ebay and pick up an ancient laptop? This gives you a cpu, motherboard, hard drive, network interface, and a display. I was able to find old, functional laptops for under $150 on ebay.
I would pull the motherboard and mount it against the back of the display, then order a premium, custom built frame from a picture frame shop for ~$25-$100. You could be cheap and build your own, but $100 should get something nice and elegant. Another option would be to just pick up a pre-built frame and put in an insert cut to your spec.
For people not up to the skill level of configuring Linux, they could simply boot to Windows and set their SHELL variable to a screen saver's executable for cycling pictures. There is one built-in to XP, but many freebies are out there for previous builds of Windows.
Personally, I would opt for a wireless NIC and mount a share where the pictures are to be stored. That way I could simply copy new pictures over to the system from my main computer.
Picked up a book by Chistopher Negus and Chuck Wolber published by Wiley Tecnology Publishing called Linux Toys They do the same thing with an old laptop - something you can pickup for less than $100
I have a hacked I-Opener in my kitchen that runs a randomized slideshow of all my digital photos when it is blanked by xscreensaver. Not only does it allow friends and family to see a random sampling of our life on the fly, it gives me a terminal when I need it.
Last I checked, I-Openers were about $50 on ebay.
The idea of being able to SSH into your picture frame makes D&D enthusiasts look good by comparison...
Costs $80.00 on e-bay, has web browser, and is hackable. Just wire it to your LAN and feed it from any random conputer in your house. It can also do a whole bunch of other stuff.
I just did this a month ago with a gimpy dual-usb iBook. The real benefit to using actual computer hardware to do this sort of thing is versatility. The one for $470 from ThinkGeek stores 80 pictures and shows 'em on a 10.4 inch screen. Mine pulls from a database of > 10,000 totally random images (http://www.unrendered.org/unrendered/montage.php) , streams my library of 12 GB of music videos over airport, plays NASA TV, and has enough horsepower (500 Mhz) to play iTunes visuals. And that's it only because I can't think of anything else for it to do ;-)
Change the theme again, and me and my girlfriend are now swingers in a virtual orgy.
;)
Keep the wind machine, and that would be wikkid
The only way this become truly cool (considering the hassle and expense) is for it to multipurpose as a home appliance that will also play MP3s (and possibly even movies) off your server.
I don't mind a nicely organized tube of wires running down the wall (a really clever person would run the wires in the wall and place the frame over the various outlets), but I don't know enough about input peripherals to see an easy way to attach a keyboard and mouse. I suppose one could go with an IR wireless deal, the mouse would be the main thing.
Do they make a mouse that functions without any kind of base, something that works almost like a pointer?
The upcoming Nano-ITX boards should offer even more flexibility for this type of design.. It's smaller, takes less power, and runs cooler. It also takes DC power, so you don't need to mess with the ATX -> DC/DC converter stuff that the Mini-ITX requires (although, there is supposed to be a DC Mini-ITX board coming out).
The down-side is that these have been announced for several months, but are still not available for purchase.
previous /. article->old powerbook to picture frame
and this guy made all sorts of cools tuff with tibooks/powerbook prototypes including picture frame... some tiny mame "cocktail" cabinets etc...
*shrug*
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
I have 3 12" thinkpad screens I got off ebay (yeah i have an old thinkpad) but they only cost $5. Can anyone tell me where to find information about the displays and how to drive/control them? like is it just a video card I need? perhaps I could make my own 12" picture thingy.
Error: Id10t detected
Why not use LTSP and netboot? you'd simply need an app to display the pics that ran native on the LTSP client. Of course this is not a stand alone solution.
True friends are hard to come by... I need more money. - Calvin
For a free solution:
* Open up already purchased laptop
* Place in strategic location on desk and turn power on
* Wait for boot and login to computer desktop
* Open Kwickshow and point it at graphics file collection
Done.
You're absolutely right that your family is unlikely to give a spit about the technical specs of the digital picture frame you give them. They'll be happy that it shows pictures that change over time. Wheee!
But there's more to giving a gift that just giving someone something that's off the shelf. I'd wager that your family will appreciate a custom-made gift (if it's well-made, that is) more than something you spent thirty minutes on picking up at the mall and which they can see sitting in their neighbor's house the next day.
But what happens when the pre-built models really aren't that great? When I looked into getting a pre-built model for my folks last Christmas, the models all seemed to hover around 640x480 pixels and 8-bit color. I take my digital photos at 1280x1024 with 24-bit color, and frankly I don't think they'd look all that great at one-quarter the size and an even smaller fraction of the color palette.
Also, most of the models I looked at used a plain telephone line to download updates (new photos and the like). Everyone in my family is sitting on broadband Ethernet connections, so I'd much prefer something that at least had the option of an Ethernet jack.
And another thing: most of the pre-built digital frame companies charge a monthly service fee in order to download new content. So not only do you have to pay for the frame itself, you have to keep paying in order to use it!
So for me, the "coolness factor" has little to do with it. Instead, it's all about pride in displaying my work, being able to include the options I want, and only having to pay for the whole thing once.
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
If you check around you can find tons of old Pentium 1 and 2 class laptops people are almost willing to give away. I've done a project like this myself using an old P166mmx and it's working out great so far, plus the pcmcia slots allow for things like wireless cards instead of having PCI cards sticking out the back and the option to run it on battery power.
:)
Old laptop + Linux + Framebuffer driver + FBI image viewer + Samba = nifty new wireless pictureframe you can just drag pictures to and watch them cycle
-- The only thing I can be absolutely sure of is that you are reading this.
Mr. Roger's Picture Picture.
Take care,
According to this article on ZDNet, uncle Billy has a patent on this kinda thing. Dunno if a home brew version will fall foul of the patent, but best keep yours in an upstairs spare room, draw the curtains ('drapes' for our US chums) and not show it to friends or neighbours.
Of course, if you wanna really p*ss people off:
Bill: Have the thing scroll through your virtual art library
then...
RIAA: Show some stills from your favourite music video accompanied by the matching MP3
then...
SCO: Show a tasty source code snippet from the routine of your choice
AT&ROFLMAO
If you want to display just snapshots, why not pick up an older color PDA with a cradle? They look great, run on low power, and can be had for about 100 bucks. Rigging them into a custom frame is easy, as the hardware is small.
Sure, you're not getting a 17" LCD, but let's be real... You're not getting a 17" LCD. A mini ITX board is easy to come by (I've got a spare if anyone wants one), as is a tiny HDD (Microcenter routinely sells 5gb strips for 15 dollars). Of course, you could always pick up a T-cube
Or bypass style and class altogether and get one of these things.
Note: above links courtesy of Mini Itx.com.
The ______ Agenda
I'm a little late to the "discussion" as it were, but I'm using an i-opener obtained for $50 on ebay in this capacity. Hella easy; get a replacement bios chip and even the newer 'unhackable' versions are great little terminals. Add usb ethernet, and make a 2.5"->3.5" ide cable so you can load a low-overhead version of linux (midori, m4i, etc) on the 16Mb sandisk and you're in business. I spent $100 and 4 hours total on it. Can't beat the price for a p-200 class machine with no fans, no noise, no heat, a 10" lcd, no box to hide, and can be used for web browsing/email to boot.
A computer without Microsoft is like ice cream without ketchup.
Having attempted twice in the past to boot Linux from CF, I would not recommend including the procedure in an article. Hardly plug-n-ATI, there are few Distros that will fit on a consumer level CF card, and even fewer motherboards that will boot them. I've personally never managed it. That's not to say that it can't be done (it can, obviously), just that it is probably out of the scope of the article. I certainly wouldn't want to have to deal with the forums if they recommended it.
Boot from the HDD, then spin it down and live in RAM. Unless you are uploading pictures, your picture frame server will be quiet. Of course, I do want $parent_poster to try it, succeed, get swept up, and release an solid CF Distro based upon Debian that doesn't have me tearing my hair out.
BTW, Pricewatch lists 256MB CF cards for 45 dollars, shipped. That should save you the hassle of bidding.
The ______ Agenda
Use old iBook parts and run a network (wireless!) iPhoto slideshow with all those cool transitions.
"Figure you'll need somewhere between 1,000 and 4,000 pictures per gigabyte depending on whether you bother to resize the images, plus another gig or two for the Linux installation."
Screw Linux, screw the whole project!
I did a similar project awhile back, but I used an old compaq presario 1220 laptop.. Alot of the components were able to be removed (i.e. speakers, modem, cd-rom). Anybody interested in pictures??
This is an idea ive done in a fashion; I used a reasonably crappy 640x480 19 inch LCD-TV board, and constructed a wooden frame for it; I had the good fortune to get a bunch of LCD's of different types from a company clearance - most of them the bare lcd's and drivers.
:). The closest I can get to them working in a fashion under WinXP is to plug in a dvi LCD panel that works, let it be detected, then swap to the bare lcd. Unfortunately any change of resolution etc screws it up. Perhaps someone can advise me on where to get these boards / make them; Ive had these LCD's kicking around for nealy a year now, and it seems like a real waste not to use them.
:)
I have in my possesion at the moment 5 of the bare lcd's that Apple used/uses in their 22 inch cineman display's; unfortunately I haven't got the plug and play logic boards for them, so they don't work too well
Thanks in advance, and sorry for being slightly OT
Stewart
Wouldnt it be easier to use an old laptop P1+ and take the LCD off and stack it on top of the mm/keyboard part and shove the whole thing into a thick frame. I see used laptop here for $125 CDN
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I had meant that in most tech circles old motherboards float around like like used grocery bags. Via's C3 is compatible with almost all P3 boards. The one I'm not using right now is a actually a small micro-ATX, not a full mini, which I had picked up for a project for 30 bucks online but which became redundant when upgrading my main P3 to an AMD. The C3 800 (which, by spec, is not fanless, but can be run as such with a good heat sink) was picked up for 20 on the Silent PC Review boards, but again was made unnecessary as the P3 800 can be run on a low enough air volume in the summer (and none in the winter) to make it functionally silent.
I had originally meant the statement illustratively, but I don't actually have a use for the thing right now. What were you thinking of doing with it?
The ______ Agenda
Umm why go through the trouble of building a pc to display pictures when you can just run them with any dam graphic viewer in slideshow mode? The idea of the pictureframes are for the idiots who buy sony branded cameras, ie idiots who enjoy paying too much for a crappy fixed lense camera, to stick their overpriced memory sticks in so they can view their images since they have no clue how to operate a pc to view them.
Any small video that did not require sound could be shown using geexbox.
a beowulf cluster of picture frames...
Sorry, mod me down, I have karma to burn.
Do you have ESP?
Oddly enough, I just finished building one of my own. It's a $20 NEC laptop from eBay. I believe it's a 486/25 with a 640x480x256 display, and 4 megs of RAM. It's got an Orinoco wireless card, and that's about it.
It runs Linux, except the kernel uses my own program as init. The program is statically compiled, and takes up about 600k. It contains cardmgr (to run PCMCIA cards), hdparm (to spin down the hard drive), ifconfig (to configure the network), udhcpcd (to configure the network as well), and my own "Picture Frame Server" program.
At boot, the program sets the hard drive's spindown time, installs the PCMCIA card, configures the NIC, and then begins listening. I've created a simple 8-bit (overkill, I know) bytecode containing such commands as "[P]ut Pixel at [x, y]", "[C]hange VGA color [n] to [r],[g],[b]", and "Accept Raw [S]tream".
It runs fairly quick. and needs not store ANY pictures on the frame itself, except what's on the screen. I have helper programs that convert standard pictures into a raw format that can be piped to the picture frame from any platform that can dump files to a network socket (Perl is good for that.)
char sig[120] = "\0"
I am trying to figure out the cheapest way to build a futuristic-looking video intercom system for a large house. What I have in mind is an LCD screen with a small speaker and webcam next to it, a microphone, and a fingerpad for a pointing device. There has to be a UI for selecting where you want to talk to etc.
Has anybody seen any projects along these lines? I have looked and looked on the web.
I can just see the bumper sticker now: "My picture frame runs Linux"
so you can have a picture frame showing a blue screen of death.
Or what about a beowulf cluster of these pictureframes? They could look like pictures, but in the background they could be servers.
Or these picture frames could be used as actual PC's, so someone could be playing quake on his picture frame.
Well this coudld clean things right up as the cpu can be anywhere in the house http://www.ramelectronics.net/html/PC-TV_video.htm l#wir
This was a quick search on google so im sure there are other manufacturers.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Can anyone suggest a good place to get an LCD screen for a project like this?
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Since my home PC is on all day for the personal web hosting, I guess I may add an old 486 computer as an X client to display piuctures served by my main machine, just add auto-login to the X terminal and set up xscreensaver as the default "window manager" in /etc/X11/gdm/Sessions/Xterminal so that it boots straigh into picture display mode as soon as it boots.
;)
I bet this gives the best savings and if the cash is available there may be an interactive picture frame on every room on the house
At least from the Fuji Frontier.
we have had this, years ago...
som guy that in detailed show how to convert a
PowerBook to have nice photo slideshow in a frame...
I got the boot sequence down to about 5 seconds, including the BIOS check.
It was an educational process because I started from zero and included only what I thought was needed in an embedded linux application.
"The simplest solution is to ignore your dead children."
Older notebooks are ALMOST a good option...
You see, even though you can get an old notebook for $50 or so, the problem is the color depth. My old cheapo notebook can only do 256 colors, which makes most pictures look rather crappy. Good enough for animated GIFs I suppose, but not good for pictures of the real world.
Anyhow, go for the cheapest notebook you can find that does 16-bit color (or better), and you just have to unhinge the LCD, and re-attach it (upsidedown, as it were). Of course, a notebook that close to decent is going to cost you several hundreds of dollars. But it's much better than having to pay a few buck a month for a digital picture frame dial-up subscription, especially since they can't show animations or anything else.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I know a guy who has a company that can build these very well priced, check out his website.
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