Almost exactly two years ago, I closed down Zing’s office and collected a bunch of computer hardware that the team didn’t need any more. Among it was a stack of eight LCD monitors. Although they’re all at least thirteen years old, they work fine… they just aren’t terribly useful. Always loathe to throw away working gear, I’ve been thinking about what to do with them. Finally I decided to build a giant digital photo frame.
Pepper has a nice little 5×7″ one on her desk, and it’s fun to see pictures of family and friends. But how hard could it be to build a bigger version of that?
I went to work.
I bought a shadow box– basically a large, thick wooden frame. I had a custom photo mat cut to fit the shadow box and frame the monitor. Then I disassembled the monitor, leaving nothing but the LCD panel and some circuit boards. A spare Raspberry Pi from a closet completed the technical setup: it has HDMI output so I could just plug it into the monitor, bury everything in the shadow box, and run a cord to an outlet.
It turned out to be a little more complicated than that, but not much. I wired everything together, mounted the frame on the wall, and tested it with a nice landscape photo:
Of course one of the fun things about a digital photo frame is adding photos to it! I wrote some software (cleverly called “Framey”) that’ll check an email box for photos, download them, and add them to the random mix being displayed. My kids started emailing old photos. Thom and Katie sent some. The collection keeps growing, and it’s a ton of fun to see all these photos cycling through, with an occasional one that makes us exclaim, “Where did that come from?”