Framing Up Your Electronics Projects

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[Victor] may be onto something when it comes to project enclosures. He’s using a picture frame to house his electronics projects. This is made especially easy by the variety of sizes you can find at Ikea. Possibly the most important dimension is to have enough frame thickness to sandwich your components between the glass and the back plate of the frame.

The project seen here is a temperature data logger. The frosted diffuser covering everything but the LCD screen and gives you a glimpse of what’s mounted to the back panel. He connected the four different protoboard components, along with a battery pack, to each other use right angle pin headers. They were then strapped to the back plate of the frame by drilling some holes through which a bit of wire was threaded. He even cut a hole to get at the socket for the temperature sensor and to attach the power input. So that he doesn’t need to open the frame to get at the data, the SD card slot is also accessible. His depth adjustment was made by adding standoffs at each corner of the frame, and replacing the metal wedges that hold the back in place.

You don’t need to limit yourself with just one. This UV exposure rig uses three Ikea frames.

Scary Putin Guards Your Stash

If anyone tries to take anything from this coin bank they’re going to have to brave the creepy looks that [Vladimir Putin] gives them. That’s because [Overflo] rigged up the wall hanging to react when you approach it. It’s all in the eyes, which open and turn red based on your proximity to the picture frame.

The frame itself is the ugliest thing [Overflo] could find at Ikea. He spray painted it gold and added an image of [Putin] with a zany background. At rest [Vlad] has his eyes closed. But the lids are connected to a servo motor to pull against the spring that keeps them shut. An infrared proximity sensor is used to trigger the eyelids when you get relatively close, but if you reach out your hand it will even light up the red LEDs hidden in the pupils of the eyes. See a demonstration of the setup in the video after the break.

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Digital Picture Frame That Rotates To Match Image Orientation

This digital picture frame physically rotates in order to match the image’s orientation. [Markus Gritsch] built the frame, including a Python script to translate the photos to a format which makes the best use of the 2.4″ LCD screen.

The screen is addressed in 8-bit parallel by a PIC 32MX120F032B processor. Image are read from an SD card in a raw format, with 16-bit colors pushed to the display for each pixel. To get them into this format [Markus’] script converts the JPEG files to RAW, resizes them, uses dithering to reduce to 16-bit color, then applies a sharpening filter to improve the final look. During this process it also includes orientation information. That is parsed by the microcontroller and used to drive the servo motor to which the screen is attached.

To finish off the project he spray painted a piece of acrylic to act as a bezel for the frame. Check out the demo after the break and we think you’ll agree the rotating feature, along with image scrolling, really makes this a piece you’ll want on your own desk.

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Let There Be Light Inside Picture Frames

[Limpkin] picked up a beautiful painting of Budda while in Bali because he thought it would react well with different colors of lighting. His overall goal was to create a picture frame with built-in LEDs. The major design specification for the project was to provide an indirect light source that would not shine in the viewers eyes. He got down to business designing a frame using SolidWorks for his modelling. The final design has a separate track from the paining with small dividers for each diode.

After about four hours on the CNC machine it was time to get down to soldering. [Limpkin] had 576 RGB LEDs on hand. He’s not looking to drive them individually, just to have independent control of each color. This makes the soldering a bit easier as there will be just three MOSFETs to drive each color. The final product looks great and can display any mix of colored light. Not bad for 50 hours of soldering.

DIY Picture Frame Better Than Store Bought

[Daniel’s] homemade digital picture frame looks great, it’s well-built, and it has a nice set of features. It’s not made from a broken laptop and he didn’t build it around a microcontroller. Instead, he saved a 19″ LCD monitor with a burnt out back light caused by the extremely common blown capacitor problem. Twenty dollars on eBay landed him a small industrial single board computer to drive the system.

The software end of things is a curious conglomeration but considering the hardware constraints [Daniel] made some great choices. He’s using MS-DOS along with LxPic for slide shows and Mplayer for video. The rest of the software gets him up on the home network and enables IR remote control via LIRC. All o this makes for a beautiful product (video after the break includes some Doom footage) and the package is pulling just 40W when in use.

PIC Based Picture Frame

Take a PIC 24HJ256GP206 processor and add a dash of knock-off touchscreen and a pinch of SD card compatibility for a DIY digital picture frame. [Daniel] wrote his own driver for the HX8347 controlled LCD that can achieve 15 FPS at 320×240 resolution with 16-bit color. As this was a gift for his wife, [Daniel] included a heart-shaped ring of LEDs that fade in and out like an electronic pulse. He notes that the JPEG decoder runs rather slow but that’s mostly because of the bottleneck caused when accessing data from the SD card. We’ve got more pictures and a link to the source code after the break.

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Touchscreen Picture Frame

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Circuit Ideas Design has posted a digital picture frame project based on their 240×320 16-bit color QVGA display. We made our own digital frame from a smaller screen a while back and this is pretty much the same implementation except with a larger screen and built around the AVR family of microcontrollers rather than PIC controllers.

The thing that piqued our curiosity was the five icons silk screened on one end of the display. That’s right, this is a touch screen. The board also has a built in SD slot and a bit of flexibility for connecting to a microcontroller. It can be controlled from a 40-pin header, or from headers that are designed to work as an Arduino shield. We’d love to get our hands on one but we were unable to figure out what currency the list price was in. Has anyone used this board yet?