Tonight I finished a present for my wife. A wireless picture frame based on FreeBSD.
The frame is running on an old Sony VAIO PCG-505TS that I had from many years ago. Its battery is nearly shot, good only now for powering the BIOS battery. However, I put in a solid state disk and a subset of FreeBSD. It now displays pictures from a directory on our home network in rotation.
The hardest part turned out to be how to securely mount the laptop into the picture frame.
I'll describe the software that I used in the coming days. For now, just this little teaser.
2 comments:
Looking forward to hearing more about this. :) It's something I've been considering for a while, never really seriously looked into it though.
I'm fighting through the last few issues to deploy the picture frame. I'm down to two that I know of: wireless configuration and screen saver still kicks in, even though I ask it not to do so, I thought.
I'm also fighting the funky FreeBSD subsetting tools that I used. I should try to redo it with tinybsd since I have 60MB to play with. The hard part for tinybsd is getting the right subsets of the ports installed. X is too big to fit on the 60MB device I'm using.
I really wish the Sony VAIO ts505's BIOS groked CF cards in an adapter. Then I could juts use a 1GB flash part and be done with it. I need the cardbus slot for wireless, and the box only has usb 1.1 in it, so running off of a flash stick would be painful (been there, tried that, hated it). NFS over wireless is faster. Maybe I should reevaluate my hatred of spinning media...
Thanks for the comments
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