Homebuilt Digital Picture Frame
This is a home-made digital picture frame I built that runs Debian and has WiFi, so it just displays any webpage scripted to the appropriate slideshow.
I started with a
Dell E151FP 15" flat panel that I managed to acquire from
Swapfest with the only problem being that it would not start up (including no blinking lights). These are usually easy fixes, and in this case the power plug had just come loose on the inside. The E151FP opens up nicely and the entire LCD and main board come off quite nicely, with just an additional long strip of PCB where the power switch and menu buttons are. The E151FP also accepts 100-240VAC power directly which is nice.
Pearl Arts and Crafts had a nice dark wood 9x12 picture frame which fit this perfectly (get the one with the wide frame width).
I then expanded out the inset part of the frame with a mill, allowing the LCD to nicely drop in. L-brackets and wood screws hold the LCD in place. By the way, I had to not use the glass provided with the frame because the LCD surface is just wider than the glass itself, so the glass would damage it. Here's how that looked (with the cover of the LCD driver electronics taken off; the left board is the LCD driver; the middle board is the LCD's own power supply; the right board is the high-voltage generator for the CCFL backlights):
And a close-up of the angle brackets... I used memory foam to press the LCD firmly in place without damaging it.
An old
WAFER-5825 300MHz Geode-based single-board PC runs the display (with an ultra-short VGA cable, incidentally needing a gender changer). It has an on-board PCMCIA slot, in which I fit an Orinoco 802.11 wireless card. Instead of using a hard disk, I used a CompactFlash card containing an entire Debian Sid distribution (which I installed on it using VMware on a computer with a USB CF reader, telling VMware to use it as a hard drive for the virtual machine) and CompactFlash-to-mini-IDE adapter, allowing the frame to be entirely quiet and without running a risk of hard drive failure at some point. The boards were mounted by drilling holes in the cover of the LCD and securing them with bolts and board spacers to ensure taht the contacts do not short against the metal. Sheet metal was appropriately bent into the right shape to fit around the frame (but not all of it, to leave an air gap for heat ventilation), and is held in place by plenty of wood screws and painted to match the wall colour:
That's about it! The only last component is the power supply to run the single-board PC. I used a Lambda KPS15-12 15-watt 12V switching power supply (available from
DigiKey) and while a little pricey, I prefer the reliability of a feedback-controlled switching supply over a cheap two-coil-and-rectifier wallwart which are often unreliable (not to mention that it can also accept 100-240VAC input). Also, the Lambda KPS series is nice and compact.
I mounted this supply on a plastic board and connected screw-on terminals and wired the power from the LCD's 120VAC power plug into this. Make extra sure that the switching supply has the negative output securely tied to ground, or else the outputs end up floating, and while still exactly 12.00V with respect to each other, they drift off with some constant +40 or +50V with respect to ground, if not tied down.
Here's the back of the finished display:
... and the front:
The display simply displays the contents of
this webpage in a full-screen Opera window (which cycles through a selection of photos every 20 seconds using JavaScript). Never thought the CSS Border "inset" style would be useful, did you (for those who know HTML)?
Disclaimer: 100-240VAC line voltage is dangerous. If you build this, it is your responsibility to ensure you have properly insulated and secured all line voltage components.
Copyright (C) 2007 Dheera Venkatraman. For usage of photos, please see the
Photo usage policy. Please
contact me for any use of other content from this website.
