High-End Digital Picture Frame Makes a Great Christmas Gift

These days, digital picture frames are taken for granted—or even ignored entirely. But it wasn’t that long ago that they were a hot Christmas gift item. It’s pretty easy to see why they were so popular: they could rotate through hundreds of photos instead of always displaying a single one like those silly analog picture frames.

However, if you’ve ever owned one of those off-the-shelf picture frames you find at gift stores in the mall, you know they leave a lot to be desired. They’re generally ugly, have terrible LCD quality, and are a pain to upload pictures to. For their Embedded Systems and IoT course at Reykjavik University, Jrobbproj and his partner Gunnar set out to build something better.

Because the picture frame was going to double as a Christmas present for Jrobbproj’s wife, the first step was to purchase a nice looking wood frame from a local shop. The LCD itself is a replacement unit for a laptop, which connects to a Raspberry Pi 3 and is connected through a controller board found on eBay. That also provides brightness control, and the level is calculated with a clever increasing exponential decay algorithm.

Finally, photos can be uploaded to the Raspberry Pi via a web interface, or with FTP transfers. As you can see, the result is a digital picture frame that has a far more premium feel than what you’d find at a big box electronics store. And, it’s sure to score Jrobbproj some brownie points with his wife on Christmas.