DIY digital photo picture frame
By Peter Rojas 
posted Mar 14th 2004 2:19PM
posted Mar 14th 2004 2:19PM
Popular Science has a DIY guide to making your own digital photo
picture frame. First, you should familiarize yourself with the Linux operating system (assuming that you aren't
already). Then you just need to buy a motherboard, a hard drive, an LCD monitor, a power supply, and a switch. Once
you've got all your parts, you just need to assemble them all together, install Linux, figure out how to
connect it to a network, and then transfer all of your photos to it. Yeah, this sounds way easier and cheaper
than just buying one.
[Via Slashdot]
Some wise engineer in Taiwan should listen up. Somehow there is a market for small, crappy, and expensive "digital picture frames" which doesn't pretend to compete with regular flat panel display prices, quality, and size. It should be quite trivial to produce a "flat-panel to picture frame converter" box for between $50 and $100 which accepts various memory media (flash, memory stick, compact flash, SD memory, USB, etc) and displays a nice slideshow to variable resolution VGA (suppot up to 1280x1024 is nice). No hard drive, no RAM, not a real computer. You could use the "gumstix" linux gum-stick sized computer board.
The box should be small enough to hide behind most displays, with 2 VGA cables (1 short and 1 long) for near and far placement. The box should show a picture of the device invisibly tucked away while the display is attached to the wall.
If some people buy crappy digital picture frames (so far as paying cieva $100 per year as subscription), then certainly 10 times as many customers would buy something of decent quality. You can't hope to produce a device with the display, because you won't have the same "large-market-pool" capitalistic pressures that regular displays have. Just build the missing link, damnit.
It seems obvious enough that I'm somewhat pissed I can't capitalize on it myself.
--Jason