Digital Picture Frame
G4 Mac-based digital picture frame.
|
I had available a first generation Titanium motherboard. Since I had already done several
MAME machines, I decided to try a digital picture
frame with this one. It turned out to be much simpler than a MAME machine!
It has no battery and no optical drive. The hard drive is a minimal 6 GB. It was without RAM (and the Titanium has no soldered on memory) so I picked up 128 Megs of RAM - adequate for running Mac OS X. I began by laying out the components on the backside of the LCD display. You'll see that it is more or less is laid out the way it is inside an actual Titanium. I built then a box around that out of PVC sheet plastic material. The stuff is not terribly strong but it cuts like butter (doesn't shatter nor is it brittle like Plexiglas). It's certainly strong enough when glued together honeycomb-like as you see in the photo. Ended up looking a bit like a Japanese lunch. |
|
|
The speakers were placed in one of the empty compartments (where the battery should have gone)
and with that, the whole of the Titanium fit neatly behind the display. In this way, the
display will be facing out of the pciture frame toward the viewer (of course) and the guts
of the Titanium will be behind the display facing back.
The hardest part was applying the cement and gluing the back on - sealing the whole thing up. I might have used screws or something like that, but the PVC material was, as I said, not terribly strong. Putting the back on with cement really stiffened up the whole box. I made sure before I put the back on that I had cut access holes for 1) the RAM, 2) the Lithium cells, 3) the heat sink 4) the USB port, 5) the power adapter plug, and 6) the firewire port. The hard drive is sealed up, as are the other ports and motherboard. In a pinch I might be able to saw additional holes in the back. I made a custom 11 by 15 inch frame, had a custom piece of glass cut, and made my own matte. From the backside you can see some reinforcing wedges I glued on as well as the two stands. |
|
Consider that, with a USB keyboard and mouse plugged in, it is a fully functional picture-
frame-shaped computer. To move files on and off, I can use a firewire drive.
Here it is from the front and running Mac OS X (Jaguar in fact). The frame is painted black, the matte is gray. (You can see the cord running out behind.) |
|
|
And finally, one of several hundred photos I have currently loaded up. It is currently the
default Mac OS X Slideshow screensaver. By editing the info.plist I was able to get the screensaver
to kick on in 5 seconds. That means it comes up fairly quickly after boot - but if you have a USB
keyboard attached (and firewire drive for example) you can rather easily move files around
and generally use the thing.
The images change every 30 seconds or so. I would like to change that since it is rather hypnotic. People just stand and stare at it. If the image changed every 30 minutes or so, a person would not be inclined to stand there waiting for it to change. So there you are. Might do a Mac-quarium next since I came across an old SE case.... |