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Three years ago for Christmas I built my wife a 14 inch digital picture frame from an old laptop and a nice picture frame from the hobby store. It boots puppy
by megamark16 15y ago
Three years ago for Christmas I built my wife a 14 inch digital picture frame from an old laptop and a nice picture frame from the hobby store. It boots puppy linux from a usb stick, and runs through a slideshow of all of the pictures in the SLIDESHOW folder on the thumb drive, so there are basically no moving parts (old laptop with no fan, just a heat sync). It's been running strong for the past 3 years and only needs a reboot when the house loses power. I love DIY projects.
- middus 15y agoCute project, but does not sound very energy efficient to me.
- leoedin 15y agoI did pretty much exactly the same thing a few years ago. The power supply is about 25W, but judging by the heat coming off the frame I doubt it uses half that. The main power draw is probably the screen. I removed the hard drive and replaced it with a CF card (basically no power draw), and the fans have been replaced with a large heat sink. For my photo frame, I used cron and set various times for it to turn off the screen. Obviously it's a luxury in terms of power usage, but given that it pulls about as much power as a bright energy saving lightbulb, it's not really a huge issue. In terms of cost, 25W continuous costs about 6c a day, so I'd imagine the whole frame costs less than half that once you take into account the screen-off time and the reduced power draw anyway.