Litte Pictureframe is watching You

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By Matt Mets
Posted 2011/03/23 @ 12:15 pm
Category Computers & Mobile

Nikolaus Gradwohl wrote in to share his little pictureframe project, which turns an old LCD picture frame into a fun animation piece:

I found a cheap digital picture frame at a local electronics store a while ago and searched a project for it. So i installed 60 jpegs with eyes looking in different directions on the pictureframe and started an endless slideshow. Now the picture frame sits on his shelf and is carefully watching whats going on in our livingroom.

It’s pretty straightforward to do, and his blog post includes the Processing program that he wrote to generate the images. Extra LCD frames are pretty common these days, but I haven’t seen them re-used in many projects… can you think of any other ways that they might be useful?

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2 Responses to Litte Pictureframe is watching You

Randy Addison on March 23rd, 2011 at 10:11 pm said:

Does it detect movement? Just the Eye of Sauron thing featured all over the net for the past few days? lol If so, then this will also be a great creepy scare tactic during Halloween.

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Paul Tachdjian on March 24th, 2011 at 8:27 am said:

“can you think of any other ways that they might be useful?”

Actually, yes!
A while back, I wanted to scratch build a Bender costume using at least 75% metallic elements. However, such an undertaking would mean the height of my Bender would be 7′ 4″ to be in true proportion. This relates to the circumference of human thighs…

Anyway before the impractical size issue, I wanted to make dynamic eye and mouth sections. The idea was some kind of LCD screen, but it had to be cheap. For the mouth (which follows the arc of Benders head tube) it would need to be the new super-thin flexible screen. Too pricey.
It would also accept input from a mic inside the head section, thus acting like a real-time spectrum analyser – like the “real” Bender.

The eye movement… I hadn’t nailed the design spec for that. One idea was to use a re-purposed PS2 analogue stick for 9 possible directional changes. A simple program would again be needed to link input to animations. Because the arms would be so long, your hand would end just before his wrist.
There would be enough room to mount a few small controls!

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