Quote:
This guy used an old laptop
[...]
The software is probably easy by comparison...


Last year for Christmas, I made each member of my family a wireless photo frame from old laptops. The software was my fun little project and was really just web-page scripting. The laptops just boot into a full-screen borderless browser.

All the commercial offerings at the time were either too low-res, too expensive, or required a monthly subscription to some service which didn't quite do what you wanted anyway.

I was thinking I had posted pictures here of my experimentation, but I guess I never got around to it.

It was a good learning vehicle for me, and resulted in fun gifts for the family.

Everybody can post pictures that everyone else instantly sees on their photoframes and you can adjust the randomization ratios when you feel like seeing more pictures of your kids and fewer of your brothers trip to Italy, or vice versa.

Anyway, I'm interested in a better, sleeker, open-source alternative for future upgrades. When I looked at Embedded Boards or stuff with the micro-ITX form factors, they all were more expensive than just ripping apart an old laptop.
(And I didn't want to take time to figure out how to interface cheap used laptop LCDs to these boards.)

Unfortunately, any software I have I can't contribute to this effort because it isn't really re-usable. (And anyway could be whipped up in short order by anyone remotely conversant with MySQL, PHP, and CSS. Which is probably most of you.)

I'll be following developments here with interest.