Make your own digital photo frame
Displaying photos is becoming a strenuous task. With services such as Photobox, you can print your photos cheaply, but who wants a stack of paper anymore? Alternatively, you could go the digital photo frame route, but the price of these devices is a bit silly, for what it is.
Unless… Well, the answer is in the head-line, really. Why not make your own?
Chances are that you could procure a few-years-old laptop for little or no money, depending on the people you hang out with (no, I don’t mean your brother’s criminal mate, I mean how geeky people are. Jeez, you guys always think the worst of me! Honestly!).
Popular Science magazine recently ran a story on how it can be done…
The hardware: a four-year-old IBM laptop donated by PopSci’s IT department. Ask around and you’ll probably find a similar castoff machine, but if not, there are hundreds of suitable notebooks on eBay for less than $200—just about anything running Windows 2000 or better will suffice. You’ll also want to add Wi-Fi, either through a USB adapter or a PCMCIA card, so your mom can set the frame anywhere. (If the folks don’t have Wi-Fi, you can pick up a wireless router for about $20 online). To fit the screen’s nonstandard dimensions, I ordered a custom-made frame from americanframe.com, which offers hundreds of styles and materials and lets you visualize the matte and frame together before you hit ‘buy.’
The full, deliciously verbose version of the article is available over on Popular Science, or a more DIY-friendly version with more photos can be found here
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This entry is © Haje Jan Kamps / Photocritic.org, and was posted on Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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#1 - August 22nd, 2006 at 09:19
Great! Add 200 kWh per year to your electricity bill! Just what I needed, living in the Netherlands, where energy (gas, electricity, petrol) is the most expensive in the world!
#2 - January 22nd, 2007 at 02:14
I don’t know about 200kWh - I think its more like 100kWh - I have a 10.4 inch LCD digital photo frame that uses just 12W … so if you left it on 24/7 for an entire year that would be 105kWh
http://www.digivista.com.au/product_digivista_clearview_10.html
I worked it out to be about AU$15 for the entire year, although I’m living in Australia where electricity is about AU 15c per kWh.
#3 - January 22nd, 2007 at 19:50
I wanted to mention my site which lists a ton of digital picture frame diy projects: http://likelysoft.com/hacks/pictureframes.shtml