Linux Picture Frame Serves As Wireless Raspberry Pi Display

Here’s a novel approach to adding a display to your Raspberry Pi. Instead of using a wired display — either via the HDMI (which can feed a DVI port with a simple hardware adapter) or the composite video out — [Chris Bryden] decided to use Bluetooth to provide a wireless display. This really depends on the hardware that you have available. He snapped up a hackable digital picture frame for a song and used the 320×240 display for this project.

You can see the USB nub plugged into the RPi in the image above. It’s a Bluetooth dongle and there’s with a matching one on the digital frame. With the two networked in such a way [Chris] got to work setting up a VNC that would let him pull up the X desktop over the network.

This ends up being one of the best uses we’ve seen for the Bluetooth protocol, and the small screen offers a huge advantage over the use of a simple character display.

13 thoughts on “Linux Picture Frame Serves As Wireless Raspberry Pi Display

  1. Nice work on getting the df3120 talking to the pi, always nice to see them working in real world projects :)

    I noticed it was a little laggy but hard to tell whether that’s just the bluetooth or X being naturally laggy.

    1. Try using it with the HDMI first, if it’s slow with the HDMI, then it’s most likely not the bluetooth. But I think that the VNC is also to blame, with such a low spec computer running it, and using bluetooth will surely decrease frame rates.

  2. Are we seriously going to do this? Everything that has been posted before as linux/router/micropc will just be ported to run on the Pi and then brought up as if its a whole new thing?

    The raspPi is a computer.. so yeah all those thousands of projects we’ve seen before will also run on it. NOTHING NEW HERE

    I love the fact that the raspberry pi is so powerful for the cost but hardly any of us can actually get hold of them and they’re just a computer at the end of the day, a really small one sure.

    1. Yes.

      Deal with it, or I’ll make a binary clock with a pi, and publish that all over the internet. And I’ll use way too many expensive sub optimal components, and do it on a breadboard.

    2. Ahahahahaha. There are somewhere in the order of 100,000 raspberry pi boards in the hands of end-users, you were probably still in bed or too busy whining about arduino posts to make an order at the right time.

  3. So which bit don’t you understand as a hack? He had to get linux on the parrot frame, that’s a hack not quite good enough for you? Of course though, you’ve offered up some insightful alternatives that we could all be looking at, I can’t wait to go and look at them, oh wait….

    1. To be fair, it was the very clever work of others that hacked linux onto the Parrot – see the link in the OP, all I did was pair it up with the Pi. I just thought the concept, and a bit of a how-to might be a useful time saver for others…

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