I’ve never really seen the point of digital picture frames. If you want to regularly change the pictures in your frame, just take down the frame and swap out the picture. You’ll save some money on your electric bill.
But if you’ve got your heart set on a digital photo frame for the living room, why not build one that can do a whole lot more than just display pictures? One hacker decided to take apart an Eee PC 701 netbook with 2GB of flash storage and turn it into a digital photo frame. That may not a lot for a laptop, but plenty for a picture frame.
When booted, the netbook photo frame launches Ubuntu and opens a web browser pointed at a web page that displays a photo slideshow. If you wanted to install a touchscreen you could probably get away with doing some light web surfing and other activities like streaming music or watching web video as well.
You can often find refurbished or used Eee PC 701 netbooks going for $250 or less on eBay or computer retail sites. And it looks like the other parts used in this hack are pretty cheap, which makes this photo frame at least as practical (for people who like taking computers apart and putting them back together again) as most digital frames you can purchase in stores.
via Hack A Day
While hacking your machine into a picture frame – add an IRda receiver – –
Then you can interface your favorite “clicker box” to it and never get off the couch.
I won’t use a digital picture frame until it becomes very energy efficient to the point of e-ink displays. E-ink displays would make great digital picture frames since it only uses power to refresh or change images. I think it will happen sometime in the future when e-ink displays acquire color (there are color prototypes out) and become more affordable.
Ok, if you already have one laying around and can’t think of another use for it. However since you can get a new 7″ digital picture frame for $39.99 from surpluscomputers.com it wouldn’t make much sense to get an eee 701 from eBay to modify. The frame I just mentioned even plays several formats of video including Divx/Mpeg4. The eee would have a better display though, most picture frames are pretty low res.