Scott Walker, the assistant managing editor of The Birmingham (Al.) News, has got a great blog post about how he converted an old newspaper box into a web-connected digital frame.
With a newspaper box bought from eBay, a Mac mini, some hardware, and a little deft coding, he was able to replace the box’s window with an LCD panel. Now, every day, the box connects to the Internet over his home wireless network, grabs the front pages of a number of newspapers, displays them in a slideshow in the window, and can even play music. The software he wrote can grabs RSS feeds and email, too.
Not likely the kind of product that could see mass production, but a terrific project with a great result, especially in light of the recent release of a DIY wireless frame kit. Head on over to Walker’s site to see more photos, the process he went through to build the box, and check out a video of the box in action.
A few weeks ago, we addressed the idea that some of the people who will be joining the wireless photo frame world will be doing so by building their own digital frames. For those who like tinkering projects, this is a great undertaking, but it required buying a lot of parts of cannibalizing other electronics equipment to get the parts you need.
Well, making your own frame just got a lot easier thanks to the RedPost/Kit.
RedPost/Kit is a do-it-yourself digital picture frame. The kit, which includes everything you need to build your own wireless picture frame, is designed specifically for people who like to get under the hood of their electronics and tinker away.
The kit features a 19-inch LCD screen, 128 MB of onboard memory, a 512 MB USB memory card, USB and Compact Flash slots, built in 802.11 b/g wireless, and 5 case color options. The frame runs a version of Linux, meaning those who like to hack their products will be able to do most whatever they want.
It would probably be good to have the frame support more kinds of removable storage media and the US$550 price may be a little high for a build-it-yourself item, but I can imagine RedPost selling a pretty decent number of these to the technically inclined.
