Digital Picture Frame

The best way I have found to display family photos is on a computer…After seeing a digital slide show of wedding photos at the wedding reception, I thought it would be the perfect thing for the colossal amount of photos my parents have.

 The design was really simple…the entire unit consists of a old laptop computer purchased off Ebay disassembled and placed into a wood and glass frame.  If I had been just a little smarter and grounded the LCD the first two times, I would not have had to purchase three computers.  But all told the project ran about $50.  The final laptop I purchased cost me $1, but the processing speed is plenty to cycle through a series of photos with a digital slide show program.  I purchased this one from http://www.digitalslideshow.com, and have been really happy with the program.  It resizes all the photos displayed to the resolution of the computer which helps if you have a variety of sizes.

 The frame potion of the project was just some 1 X 3 pine boards mitered to fit the computer and a few feet of pine baseboard moulding.  The glass is simply single strength class purchased from Lowe’s, they will of course cut it size for you.  It is important to maximize the usable area of the screen while at the same time ensuring that only the screen of none of computer itself can be seen through the glass.  As this is the case, providing detailed construction and assembly notes is useless since it will change with each computer.  I chose a Compaq LTE-5280, 100MHZ, with a 3 gigabyte hard drive. 

 The only alterations I had to make to the computer were to add an external dowel that would activate the On/Off switch.  Other than that it has remained very much the same.  More than likely you will be forced to completely dismantle the LCD portion of the laptop since the whole screen will eventually sit on what was the bottom of computer.  Here are some pictures to detail this process if it is unclear.

 I do plan to write a short program in Visual Basic or C++ that will act as a timer to make sure the computer will be shut off after a specified period of time.  At the time I thought up this project, I decided to first check into purchasing a digital picture frame.  For the money I spent I would not have been able to purchase even the smallest unit($200) for which the screen is only about 7” on the diagonal.  The internal memory of the units I looked at wasn’t even close to what I could build for ¼ that price.

 This is yet another way to dispose of an old laptop and get something useful at the same time.  It is simple, cheap, and useful.  Here are some sample photos.  

        

There was an article in Popular Mechanics How 2.0 in the late summer that detailed how to design and build a really advanced DPF.  I tried to use Linux but failed, this was a great compromise that works very well.  But if you have more skill than I, it may be worth checking it out...