Dak Board: Dynamic Digital Photo Frame

This year for Christmas I knew exactly what to get for my mom. She is type of person who has everything she needs and more, so normally getting her a present she'll actually like is pretty difficult.

,This year in October I remember asking her if she saw the pictures from our trip to Thailand on my Facebook and she mentioned that she doesn't get on Facebook. Ever. Well, almost ever. I can understand. I don't get on there much myself. 

Now that I knew she doesn't normally see my pictures, which is the only reason I seem to use Facebook these days, I decided to figure out how to make it easier for her to keep up with what's been going on in my life. 

I started off looking around online for some ideas and came across a great site with a blog article that explains how they built a Do-It-Yourself digital photo frame even can even display the date, time, and weather in real-time. The above picture is featured on their site.

Now, every monitor is different. I bought the perfect monitor on Amazon, or at least I thought I did. It was large enough to grab attention, thin enough to be low profile, and was compatible with most wall mounts. Problem was, it was cracked when it arrived. I was sad :(

As you can imagine this put an extra time crunch on me to get it finished in time to wrap for Christmas, so I bought the next monitor at a local computer shop so I knew it worked. It wasn't as thin, but still had a good screen size and was wall mountable.

Materials

I already had everything else I needed to put it together, but for reference here are the materials listed in their blog article:

• Monitor with HDMI input (preferably an IPS panel!) (roughly $200, depending on size)
• Short HDMI cable (1 foot is perfect, but 3 feet works too) ($7, Amazon)
• Raspberry Pi computer (plus wifi dongle, if using the Pi version 1 or 2) ($36, Amazon)
• 8GB+ SD/Micro SD card – purchase a micro SD card in our shop. It’s pre-loaded and ready to go! ($8, Amazon)
• Micro USB charger (for Raspberry Pi) ($7, Amazon)
• Power Extension Cord ($7, Amazon)
• Photo Frame Wire ($4, Amazon)

Outline

The article does a great job of detailing all of the steps so I won't repeat them here. For the full article, visit: https://blog.dakboard.com/diy-wall-display

To summarize, the process goes something like this:

• Purchase materials
• Create a DAKboard account
• Configure the DAKboard
• Install Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi
• Configure the Raspberry Pi
• Install Raspberry Pi inside Monitor
• Hang it up

Hardware

​Creating a DAKboard account is easy and so is configuring the DAKboard itself. Configuring the Raspberry Pi is pretty straightforward but it can be challenging if you have never used Linux or if you have a newer model that doesn't have as much support content on the forums. The hard part is getting the Raspberry Pi to fit inside of your monitor so that it cannot be seen. Here's how I got mine to fit.

After removing my monitor's casing I noticed that the inside had a metal frame. Inside of the metal frame was just enough space to hide my Raspberry Pi. The only challenge with that was that the HDMI and power were on the outside of the frame. As they say, "over, under, around, or through. There is always a way." In my case, through. I didn't really have any metalworking tools, so I just used an old drill bit I didn't mind damaging and drilled holes through the frame big enough to fit the HDMI cable through. 

I also shaved some of the plastic casing off of the end of the HDMI cable to make it smaller so I could keep the drilling to a minimum. You can see the original blue casing on the top end of the cable and the thinner end result in clear plastic at the bottom:

Next I connected the necessary cables to the Raspberry Pi, placed the Pi inside of the monitor frame and ran the USB (for power) and HDMI (for display) cables out of the hole I drilled into the frame:

Next I plugged the cables into the right ports. I used a HDMI > DVI adapter in my case because the computer shop I went to didn't have monitors with HDMI for a decent price. After that I put the case back on the monitor, buttoned it up, turned it on and viola!