Slashdot Mirror
Homebrew Digital Picture Frame w/Remote
feagle814 writes "I've always wanted to create one of those digital picture frames out of an old laptop, and on the heels of a recent slashdot story, I've written up my Digital Picture Frame project. What's unique about this particular incarnation of the digital picture frame is that mine includes a homebrew remote control recognizer made out of a programmable IC, the Microchip PIC16F628. The article discusses everything from design considerations to custom slideshow software, all the way to final presentation, with lots of photos along the way."
I saw one of these made with an old Powerbook Duo about 3 or 4 years ago.
I have gas, but my car uses petrol.
I've heard of projects like these before, but isn't there the huge problem of only being able to view the picture from directly ahead, seeing as it's usually a passive matrix screen? It seems like it defeats the purpose of having one as a background decoration.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
I may try to do something like this, though.
Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/
I have just such a useless machine lying around -- I gave it to my father precisely because it's so old; I figured he needed something slow to learn on. But he hasn't taken it out of the box, and this may be a project that a) gets him some actual use out of the machine and b) keeps the machine out of the trash for that much longer. god knows the guy won't recycle.
Digital is cool and all, but when I was in boy scouts we built an analog picture frame. Man, you should see the technical specs on it, amazing.
Watch out!
" I'd seen do-it-yourself picture frames on Slashdot before,"
He's trying to trick us into Slashdotting Slashdot through a link back!
Why not just take a portable dvd player (7" for $129) and put a DVD into it filled with all your favorite pictures, then it'll display them. Then you just mount the thing in a frame.
http://codeus.info
The final battery connection
Of course, we all know that messing with Lithium-Ion batteries is just asking for a chemical acid explosion.
This is actually urban myth. Only old first style lithium batteries from earlier in the 1980s would explode or be capable of igniting on touch with the atmosphere.
Lithium Ion are exactly that, the Lithium are stored as IONS in the solution and are not reactive.
nothing burnt out, no smells other than new circuit board smell. The thing didn't even have any dust in it for such an old thing.
Did you think of maybe using a multimeter or some other basic testing equipment to see why it didn't work?
The funny thing is that I've been meaning to do a project just like this.
Except, unless you're looking for a reason to make your life more difficult, Windows IR software is abundant. Hardware is even cheaper, and not very complex. I remember using Girder (back then it was free, there might still be some sites around that offer the older version), and this captures IR codes from a COM port, and feeds specific keystrokes to a program of choice. MUCH easier than the route that the submitter mentioned.
Look up the LIRC project (in the FAQ somewhere) for schematics on a IR receiver if you really want to put the work in, or you can even buy some pre-made receivers. I bought one for $5 including a remote a few years back.
To get this running under Linux is easy enough, and well documented throughout the web. But to get it under windows can be just as easy.
Basically, to get this going under Windows (as the submitter chose, for some reason), you need to just load Windows XP and use the preloaded My Pictures screensaver (or some other alternative, I'm sure that they are abundant). Take an extra 10 minutes to mount a frame on a LCD (removed from the cover), and then set the screensaver to kick in 1 minute after booting (no password, not that it really matters). And you're done, ready to enjoy the rest of your christmas break with family or friends.
Folks, I realize that digital picture frames are "cool", but may I please present another perspective?
Until we figure out a way of generating clean, renewable power, perhaps this isn't the time to be coming up with more and more ways of consuming power for trivial applications, such as digital picture frames and blowup lighted Christmas figures that run an electric blower motor all night(!) Just consider it, please.
It's just as interesting to come up with ways of reducing household power consumption.
One key fact: he got a donated laptop. Yep, that's right. He just reversed the screen on a laptop, folks. This is not some cool project you can do at home, because you have to scrap a freakin' laptop to get it done.
This isn't a bad idea, but I was hoping he was using the PIC to drive the panel directly. It'll cost a few bucks to keep this picture frame running.
I've driven VGA monitors from a FPGA before, but never a LCD panel directly - they're typically nightmares to work with. It strikes me that a digital picture frame might be a great project for someone to work on, and a practical application for some of the stuff over at OpenCores.
A low-end Spartan FPGA would do the trick (or maybe even something more lowly than that). You'd need to implement a driver core for SVGA or a DVI interface, a interface to a compactflash card, some glue logic for that, and not much else. And a PCB to hold it together.
Unfortunately I'm much too busy to tackle something like this myself right now, but if anyone would like to try it, I could point them in the right direction to get started.
..don't panic
1. Modification For Direct Power +2
2. IR Controller made with a PIC +8
3. Powered By Windows -9
Total 1 Point on the coolnes factor
Tech Note: 1 additional point could be gained
farily easily with the addition of a blue led.
Got Code?
the RF12F675 makes a nice transmitter.
I find given the fact they are roughly the size of a sheet of paper old notebooks make excellent paperweights.
My crazy Uncle Tony built a dynamic picture frame. It was way cooler than these fancy lcd dealies you're hearing about these days. He printed out a bunch of pictures on one of those old sk00l dot matrix printers that used the paper sheets with the holes on the sides, that you had to rip off after it printed; you know what I'm talking about. Anyways, he printed a bunch of pictures on a long sheet. Then he put em in his dynamic picture frame, which allowed you to switch pictures using a crank that rolled the sheet picture to picture. It was totally cool.
But I hear that in korea, only old people use low tech dynamic picture frames. Uncle Tony lived in South Jersey, and if you called him old, he'd fucking kill you by bludgening you with a baseball bat.
Krudler
...look how you can waste more dead dinosaurs with this useless electronic picture frame!
I fucking HATE blue LEDs. When I take over the world, I find the inventor of these suckers, glue a pair to his eyelids, wire them to a blinker circuit, and make him wear them for the rest of his miserable life.
The fact that i have two laptops rotting away in the garage is scrapping them.
One of them might work as a digital pic frame and that'd really give it new life instead...
Electronic paper, if we can ever get it into high quality, and I do mean high quality, that would be pretty cool for digital picture frames. But I'm assuming electronic paper uses less electricity than a monitor does. Correct me if I'm wrong.
I did a very similar project. I hacked a laptop so I could fold it around back to back with the screen facing outward and the keyboard facing the wall and put it all into a frame. It has a wireless pcmcia card to control it remotely (changing the slide show). I use "anyplace control" for this, a cheaper alternative to PC Anywhere. The only wire is run through a small hole in the wall concealed behind the "picture" which exits at the baseboard and leads to the power supply hidden behind some furniture. The operating system was Windows 98 which was already on the Laptop. It did not have enough drive space for much else and the OS was already installed. I was almost defeated by the hall effect switch that makes the laprop shut down when the screen is folded down to close it. I had always assumed, without thinking about it that the laptop shut down when closed because of a phyiscal contact. Actually there is a hall effect switch that senses the magnetic field orientation of the screen. This swich on my old laprop (A Dell) also shut it down when the two halves were separated and put back to back. I could not think of any way to disable the switch, even if I could locate it among all the anonymous components soldered to the motherboard. However a piece of light guage sheet steel inserted between the two halves of the laptop effectively shielded it and stopped the laptop from shutting down. The project had the advantage of being relatively cheap but the poor angle view is a drawback. I am planning a replacement using a flat screen monitor and some mini components (motherboard, power supply and hard drive velcroed to the back of the screen.) I would also use Linux which will make it easier to control the thing remotely using telnet and FTP.
As someone who deals with broken electroncs on a daily basis, this comment is more inciteful than insightful. Unless you happen to have schematics + notes + spare parts lying around, it is *REALLY* hard to find and debug things. If there is a smoking gun - burnt trace, smoked resistor/transistor, leaking capacitor/diode, etc, you at least have a chance, but if all you have to go on is "it doesn't work"... It's more than easy to spend hours to days trying to figure out why it doesn't work, and how to fix it.
Its called being practical. Option 1 is to figure out how to fix a unknown defective power supply. Option 2 is to hack in a new one. Guess which option could possibly result in completely toasting the entire laptop? Guess which one is easier?
No need to secondguess a decision that actually provided results, right?
I'd love something like this, but I'm far too busy/lazy to build my own. A business opportunity for someone, perchance?
http://www.themeparks.ie
clean power? We have it. It's called nuclear. Trouble is, it's too 'imperfect' for all the types that cry 'save the earth!' at every inoppurtune moment.
If it wasn't for the idiot tree huggers who put a stop to nuclear power in the US, our air would be a lot cleaner right now.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Personally, I liked the Temple of the Monkey God.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
A few years ago I bought up some of those Virgin WebPlayers and I-Openers from eBay and other places, and proceeded to hack into them with the instructions provided.
The WebPlayer I'm using in the living room has Windows 95 on it reduced down using LitePC, and has Opera running as a web client. Also installed is Identafone, a piece of software that will display caller-id information on the screen. Add a cheap USB network adapter, plug in the phone line to the modem, and fire up the web browser to bring up a variant of the Block-random script provided by the Gallery distro, and you have a Photo Frame/Caller-ID box that has a small footprint and has no moving parts (no fan or hard drive).
I've also done the same thing with the I-Openers, installing a small 10-Gig laptop drive or so using a custom IMOD2 Kit. They both run very well and you end up with a much more configurable picture frame than a store-bought one for around a third of the cost. Now, I wish I could do something with some type of Linux distro on these guys, and I'm sure that it's possible, but I just haven't had the time after doing these. Ideas anyone? Would a Linux distro run on these boxes and still have enough memory to run a GUI to display photos?
I built a simple powerframe. Works pretty well - good enough to impress friends.
Powerframe (Powerbook 5300c)
...18...19...20 Submit
This link was posted to the freevo-users list in October:
d igital-picture-frame/
http://chrismetcalf.net/blog/archives/2004/10/16/
That also uses an old laptop.
It just doesn't make financial sense to fossil fuel-based energy companies to spend tons of money on a plant that makes their existing plants and infrastructure obsolete and has the effect of making their product, energy, cheaper.
That's a good point, and I'm sure it's responsible for some of the stagnation. You must also keep in mind, though, that in the many de-regulated markets that exist in the country, new companies (or ones from different regions) can come in, build a new plant, and undercut old companies in the area by selling electricity at half the price.
Regulation and environmentalists of one stripe or another are responsible for a good deal of the sloth in nuclear plant construction. Until recently, the time it took, due to the myriad of regulatory bodies and their demands, to get a powerplant online was near a decade.
Additionally, starting a huge capital project that takes 10 years to begin to pay for itself is something that tends to drive down your stock price. Wall street hates new plants for that reason.
On the other hand, all those investors love already built plants. Nuclear plants are wildly profitable once they're running. Take my word for it, I work at one.
Recent developments at the NRC and companies such as Westinghouse and Bechtel have driven down the time from ground-breaking to completion to an estimated 5 years, and one company will be starting construction on the first new nuke project in two decades within a year or so- forgive me, I forget the energy company, but the plant itself will be a Bechtel CANDU plant, IIRC.
So, I'm sure your right in that some companies aren't eager to drive down their stock price or make their current equipment obsolete. On the other hand, you've got ever-expanding demand, cutt-throat competition (where available!), and desirable profit margins on the attractive side of the equation.
(I do not know the profitability of fossil fuel plants)
I guess we'll see in the next few years.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
you moron
Oh my, you have taught me the error of my ways. /sarcasm
... I can prove it to..."
I've had these arguments several times before. And there's no point. So why should I have an argument with you? You came to play baseball, I was playing football.
Incidentally, you lay down (accurate) charges of ad-hominems towards me, while laying them on thick yourself. Shouldn't you abstain from behavior you criticize in me?
"Bush is in the pockets of the oil industry.
No, you can't. You're welcome to try. I suspect your 'proof' will consist of many non-sequiters, an occasional texas sharpshooter problem, and many links to indymedia, stopwar, a PIRG or two, and some ANSWER website.
I've seen it all before. I've had my time on a college campus long enough to see all the shit Bush-haliburton-big-oil-saudi conspiracy theorists like yourself dig up, and had several of these arguments online before, where I was exposed to even more material that I'm sure I'll get more of from you.
trying to convince the world you give the guy a fair shake?
That never was really my intention from the start. I never thought there was any point in trying to convince YOU of anything. I do not think such a thing is possible. We could have traded paragraph long arguments and counter arguments on all things Bush, nuclear, and oil, but experience tells me it would be pointless. I'm no fanboy, but it takes alot of bad Kool-aid to start thinking Bush is the devil incarnate and everything he does is automatically wrong.
We've all hear the saying that arguing on the internet is like running in the special olympics- even if you win, you're still a retard.
You've spent most of this time arguing, under the misguided idea there's a point. I know there isn't, by experience.
If you're a slashdot subscriber, feel free to read every comment I've ever posted, and argue in your head against many of those, or tell your roommate or some sympathetic ear "look at what an idiot this guy is."
Actually arguing with you would be just as intelligent as banging my head against a wall.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I've created a site with a bunch of resources for making Digital Picture Frame. http://www.likelysoft.com/hacks/pictureframes.shtm l
You can visit and check out the resources or submit your own project if you'd like.
-vivacharlietuna