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)."

Pictureframe PC

[Xeed]

This is very similar to a Mini-ITX [mini-itx.com] 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.

A bit OTT

[brejc8]

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 [man.ac.uk] 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).

A similar Project using an old PowerBook Duo...

[beerits]

can be found here [applefritter.com].

Cheaper alternative

[detritus`]

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.

Use a I-Opener! or WebSurfer

[Anonymous Coward]

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/ [linux-hacker.net] they have a real good forum about this sort of stuff.

This has a lot of possibilities.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

iBook cannibalization

[Anonymous Coward]

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 ;-)

Re:Somebody Didn't Read Linux Toys

[bhtooefr]

Of course, it seems a bit overboard to use Linux for something that's only running one process. I've got an old P75 laptop (and it only uses a cord, no brick, too!), and it has an 8.4"x6.3"x640x480x16-bit screen, and an 810MB HDD. It'll run FreeDOS just fine, with a VESA TSR and LxPic (designed for HPLX palmtops, but works great on just about anything that runs DOS). After all, it does fairly well with Win95 (except with only 16MB RAM, it's dog slow). Flip the screen around, devise a latch, make a frame around it, and you've got a good picture frame. I suggest NOT matting it, as the choice of mat depends on the picture, and if it's changing pictures...

Re:A bit OTT

[shokk]

All you have to do is pick up an Audrey from Ebay and point it to a Gallery [sourceforge.net] installation and set the page to slideshow for the album. Simple and done quickly from very off the shelf parts. For bonus points, have the gallery hosted so that you don't have a server gobbling electricity 24/7; plus others can easily access the gallery the same way and emulate a Cieva [cieva.com] service.

I-Opener

[Keck]

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.

Someone Care to Help?

[Hex4def6]

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.

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 :). 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.

Thanks in advance, and sorry for being slightly OT :)
Stewart

I Just Finished My Own

[Aldurn]

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.)