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Building the WallTop
mramsundar writes "Here is an interesting link that shows how to convert your laptop into something called as walltop. A number of these walltops, when connected, can host a slideshow that can show digitized images."
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I think i'd rather keep my several thousand dollar peice of hardware fully functional and portable, thank you. PLus this requires more than one laptop? I'd rahter either sell my old laptop or hook it up into some kind of cluster.
Philosophy.
I used to have a site where anyone could upload any image to it from the internet. It ran for 2 years before I moved.
http://www.cowshark.com/artwall/artwall.jpg
Check out the last few pictures I had. http://www.cowshark.com/artwall/current.html
In my lifetime, floor-to-ceiling, transparent displays will be economical. These displays will consume zero power when static.
For those who don't like floor-to-ceiling artwork, imagine picture frames made of this material instead of an LCD screen, attached to a microcontroller and short-range wireless receiver, all for under $20. Having your favorite client over for dinner? Change all the pictures to suit his tastes. Having your mother-in-law over? Put something up to scare her away *JUST KIDDING*.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm actually doing something not dissimilar to this at the moment - in my hallway I have two 1960s Libertucci pieces of art - they're about 1" thick, and made of different layers of cardboard cut out in interesting shapes with space between them - I have three knackered old Toshibas, which I'm making into a three layered display to go on the wall - the back one will keep the backlight - they're running off a single PSU, and run gentoo off CF cards, booting off a network image on my server, so I'm just using 32M CF cards... At the moment, I've got all the hardware working, but have yet to mount them in a frame. Will put pictures somewhere once I'm done!
One can only assume you're going to be as secure as any Windows XP computer.
As much as it's nice to have it networked for ease of changing out the photos, I'd much rather see the PC card slot used to operate a PC Card->CF adapter for sneaker-netting the pics to.
It's difficult enough keeping my other Windows boxes up to date without having to worry whether or not my picture frame is running the latest service pack. Surely the benefit gained from the convenience of being able to update the pictures from a remote server is offset by having to monitor for patch compliance.
All in all though, nice idea. I can imagine setting up two of these in my living room to do "something cool" when I plop a DVD and press "Play" on the remote for my HTPC. This would necessitate that pesky network connection, but perhaps all of that hassle could be overcome by using Linux and carefully configuring the picture-frame to drop all unsolicited incoming packets and only allow traffic via port 21 to/from a specific host. Or maybe (and I'm counting on it) someone has a better idea?
"God is dead!" - Nietzsche
"Nietzsche is dead!" - God
With this you could totally make the kind of picture they have in the Harry Potter movies. You don't need much computer power. An old 486 should work fine for displaying images.
My approach would be to phantom power the device using a network cable and boot from the network. There are linux distros that would do that and provide an X server.
Some kind of sensor could detect the presence of a viewer. The idea is to provide some kind of interaction. Maybe the picture wouldn't talk back to you, or maybe it could. If it was hooked to the network, a remote box could provide the processing power necessary.
There used to be a test program in SunOS Windows (before Solaris..) called ico, which would bounce a wireframe icosahedron around a window. Someone came up with a better version and called it psycho (I think), which would bounce the icosahedron between multiple independant SunOs displays. It would be interesting to watch someone's reaction to seeing something like that slowly glide out of one picture frame and into another...
Some years ago the great guys at the Advanced Computing Lab of Los Alamos National Laboratory built this very cool setup with a bunch of Thinkpads running Plan 9:
The Powerwall
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson