Well, it's OS - there's no reason to limit it to a single solution

I agree that the power's not 'needed' but I found that board based on cost and availability - and honestly it's having the flexibility to innovate in the software that's the key for me.

I can see that a simple 'lash up' of a mini-iTX, an lcd display and a nice frame running an OS OS would solve Andy's problem in time for Christmas
(and provide a more bespoke solution than the multi-$000 one, *and* be made by hand like all the best presents )

I'm going to look for an lcd display with a tiny bezel and a very low power consumption. I'm thinking 19" minimum though - this is a wall-hanging solution, not a mantlepiece.

The hardware for such a product is about the easiest thing to get together. At least for a one-off. It's a little harder if you want to design something from scratch for mass production. But in all cases, the biggest development costs and difficulties will be in the software. That's where such a device lives or dies and what will eventually make all the difference to the consumer/user.

Recognizing this and also recognizing that there were no pre-made programs to do the while thing very wel, I decided to keep it as simple as I knew how.

I made a frame for my brother this past spring using an old Mac notebook. The slideshow is run using its screen saver and nothing more. The screen saver does zooming/panning and cross-fading (Ken Burns effect) which generally looks a lot better than commercial products. The frame was purchased at Ikea and the case to hold the computer parts was made by myself - pretty straight forward and simple design/implementation.

I took photos of the whole process but have yet to write anything up. Like creating your own software for such a product, that can be the most time consuming and difficult part.

In the end I spent more than I could have bought one for. But it ended with a 12" screen, better transitions, two gigabytes of internal flash storage, an additional 30GB of HD space that holds nothing more than the OS, WiFi, the ability to turn itself on/off on a schedule and of course the satisfaction of knowing I did it myself. And it means a lot more to the people I gave it to because of that as well.

Setting it up with dynamic DNS service one could share its resources and upload to it from the internet. Or even access it with Apple Remote Desktop or free VNC.

I suppose I'm thinking a bit 'in between'.

I was looking for a more 'off the shelf' or guided approach to make it accessible to more people. I know *I* could just (probably!) hack one together but I was hoping that it may be feasible to look for easily obtained components and design something that was accessible to more people - there aren't *that* many people out there that would attempt, from cold, to rip a laptop apart to do this - but I suspect that there are a lot who would follow a guide... especially one with a shopping list. Although there's always the problem then becomes keeping it up-to-date as hardware changes.

I was also looking at bigger screens - I want a 19" one - and they cost in at £135. So some details on VESA mounting, some suggestions as to frame design, which model screens have the best construction for this kind of approach; which have good standby power etc etc. Hints to mount an old laptop behind a screen - how to silence a laptop; using CF drives instead of hdd drives; even network boot instructions?

I don't have the expertise to even consider progressing peter's suggestion - however if others did take it forward then having 1 pico-iTX (or laptop or similar) display and several slave wifi-framebuffers would be interesting...

And I'm not wedded to pico-iTX - it's not cheap!
It may even be better to look for a very low-end laptop to sacrifice.
I really don't know
Hell, I'm lucky that SWMBO can bring home the odd old laptop destined for the skip - but suggestions gratefully received...

I would *love* a thin client that controlled a simple 3D GPU chipset - especially if I could rig it inside a 19" monitor case and use the monitor PSU etc...

I agree about the software - but it's not *that* hard. I'm thinking of a debian/ubuntu based (simply because I know it ) mini distro.
Use as many OTS components as possible and look at the hardware requirements to determine selection/behaviour

So the package selection is driven by: Do you have:
* 3D graphics
* sound
* wifi
* any peter-frame clients
*...

There's a little utility called gliv which looks like an interesting base - it does slideshows, has a 'server' concept and works with and without GL. (I've always wanted to do openGL code...)

I've already got my laptop running with a minimal install and displaying pictures - I just need to package it now

Here's the platform we need. Not as small as it could be, but cheap enough not to worry:

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS5305482907.html
http://www.clubit.com/product_detail.cfm?itemno=A4842001#

Combine that with a PicoPSU (takes nearly zero space), and an external 12VDC brick (or siphon from the LCD's brick) and we're good to go with some software.

Cheers

I saw that as well this morning, it does look good, but I wish it also had DVI, Wifi (or at least mini PCI) and no fan.

That one will also need a fan. Any photo frame I make will have to be completely silent, which means no fans. Which means a low power VIA board or an even lower powered ARM board.

Via unichrome graphics?
Not the best ISTR.

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2007-September/028578.html

If you're going with that much power then you want wizzy 3D graphics!!

So either an onboard AMD/ATI chipset (and hope they were honest about 3D) or didn't Intel release a middle-of-the-road onboard gpu with OS drivers?

Like the PSU
Like the 100+ pricing more!

I do think that totally fanless is very important. I was thinking about heatpipes and the like.

On the screen side, I'm interested in seeing if we can pull together information about reusing LCD screens, but also buying a 19" monitor and using a vesa wall mount...

On another tangent, if this is going to work (for me) it needs to be pretty. So I'm working on splashy too.

It's possible that the reviews are pretty old, and were never updated. Perhaps IMate changed that.

To be truthful, I don't have any way of verifying my claim that you don't need the Live service, because the frame appears to have issues connecting to an Apple Airport Extreme. It appears that it is not compatible with any security method that Apple has created - even WEP (is it standard WEP encryption? The description seems to indicate it's some other kind). I can connect without encryption, but I clearly don't want to do that, so I'm in contact with the company to try to get this figured out.

Still, on the frame its self, the Live service and the RSS feeds appear to be separate.

Thanks for that. I think I'll give a go.

Looks like there won't be any of the eStarling frames in the UK until the end of November at the earliest and even then supplies look limited. Plus their PC frame emulator + web server don't seem to work to well.

Hmmm

The next problem is actually buying one...

As far as I can tell the only people who actually have the 10 inch i-mate Momento for sale in the UK are PCWorld. They want £199 for it, whereas the reviews reckon the RRP is £160.

Does anyone know of anyone else apart from PCWorld who is selling the 10 inch display ?

Andy, sorry, but it appears I was wrong. I just removed my security for a moment to check the RSS thing, and it appears that you have to set up the RSS feeds in the Momento Live account. They are two separate options in the frame menu, so that's why I thought it was separate. Not sure why it wouldn't be. Seems like a pretty easy thing to me...

Anyway, I'm still looking into it, but I can't tell if the Momento account is free or not. It looks to me like it is, but I'm not sure...

Nevermind, it is ordered now anyway

I guess I'll have to pay up if there really is a subscription or hack it.

I was surprised to find a display of about ten or so digital pictureframes at the Best Buy when I happened to be there over the weekend. Hopefully this means that they are becoming more mainstream and will get better and cheaper as time goes on.

However, I did notice that many of them had a 16:9 aspect ratio. What is the deal with that? Who takes pictures that are not in the 4:3 or 5:4 neighborhood?

Oh, and I meant to point out that they had some wireless ones from Digital Spectrum and Kodak. I don't know if any of them will be available in the UK or not.

Uh, you're right. And 16:9 actually loses less data via cropping for a 3:2 image than a 4:3 screen would, though it's a lot in either case: 10.42% vs. 16.7% of the original image is lost. For reference, though, cropping a 4:3 image to 16:9 loses 18.75% of the image.

Correct me if I'm wrong; my brain is having a weird morning:

Quote:
cropping a 48:32 image for a 48:27 screen, so you're losing 5/32

I believe that means you're losing 5/48, which is 10.42%

Quote:
cropping 3:2 for 4:3 is like cropping 9:6 to fit 8:6, so losing 1/9

Again, 1/6.

Quote:
cropping 4:3 to 16:9 is like cropping 16:12 to 16:9, losing 3/12

And 3/16.