Monday, October 21, 2013

Connected Digital Photo Frame


Raspberry Pi
Surplus LCD Monitor
Open Source Software
+ little bit of custom software

Connected Digital Photo Frame


Back View

Front View


Features:

  • Updates automatically from 'the internet' wirelessly (via Wifi)
  • Photos can be added remotely
  • Self contained, one power cord comes out
  • Can be any size, whatever surplus LCD monitor or TV you want

Hardware Components

  • Raspberry Pi
  • Case (optional)
  • SDHC Flash Memory Card
  • Wifi adaptor
  • Powered USB Hub
  • Cables
    • Power (monitor & hub)
    • HDMI to DVI
    • USB micro (to power Pi)
    • USB mini (to hub)

Software Components

  • Client - Raspberry Pi
    • Raspbian - standard image pi linux image
    • feh (customized version, for photo display)
    • wget
    • exiftool (for reading captions)
    • custom bash scripts to automate photo downloading
  • Web Site - LAMP
    • PHP
    • exiftool (reading & writing captions)
    • jpegtran (for photo rotation) [server arch]
    • two custom php pages to manage photo

Extras - more projects to add features

  • Email photos to CDPF
  • Rotate & Crop on web site
  • Buttons on CDPF to stop, advance, reverse, delete, etc

Instructions to download, install all the CDPF Software

  • Client - the part that runs on the pi
  • Server - software for your own server (hosted free on OpenShift)
All this software is free and open source hosted on GitHub