Here’s an idea for home decor: a wall of digital picture frames, each slightly recessed into the wall. Why not just a single big TV showing a collage? That doesn’t seem as visually interesting or attractive as a collage of picture frames in a variety of sizes.
If people can walk right up to the wall we ideally want at least 200 dpi resolution (standard “photo quality” for prints). Thus for a display that is 20 inches on the long dimension we would want a 4K resolution; a display that was just 10 inches wide could be 1080p.
What would one use for actual displays, though? A bunch of computer monitors? A 4K monitor marketed as “24 inches” is about 20 inches in width and costs a semi-reasonable $345 (Acer at Newegg). What if you have a cluster of such monitors, though? Do you need to have a PC buried in a closet that is crammed full of graphics cards and then run DisplayPort cables out of it (an AMD card that can drive six 4K monitors; an equivalent from Matrox)? Given the low-bandwidth communication that is required (one new image every 5 minutes?) it would be a lot better if the monitor could grab images via WiFi.
What about a bunch of TVs? The smallest TVs out there seem to be 22-24 inches in size and are 1080p resolution maximum (example from Vizio
How about a cluster of digital picture frames (Amazon’s current collection
Small monitors, fed independently by Raspberry-Pis via Wifi and HDMI, pulling images off another PI set up as a media server?
It would be cheaper and more energy-efficient, I would guess, than a big honkin’ graphics card in a desktop PC, and more configurable than the picture frames.
TVs or monitors driven by Chromecasts pointed to your Google Photos folder of choice. This is what our main TV does.
Or on the smaller side, a bunch of 10 inch Amazon Fire tablets playing a slideshow off your Amazon Photos collection.
Either solution operates over wifi.
For a given population, knowledge level, existing prior investments, and natural resource prices, one would expect there should be an equilibrium level of economic activities. If the economic activity level is higher than equilibrium for some reason, I would expect the natural course of the economy is to shrink to a sustainable level.
The problem is to quantify my hypothesized 4 predictors, and make a model. The creation of an experimental model would require dictatorial powers.
In the proposed 4 predictors above, government consumption and regulation is part of the “population” predictor, and should affect equilibrium amount of economic activity.
As a non economist, I have very naive ideas about value, if spending a day at the shopping mall, and finishing with a dinner and a movie, I could add $500 to the GDP. If I spent the same day with 50% of the time watching a free online class, 50% of the time solving HW problems, I add nothing to the GDP, except the food and other groceries I consumed at home.
As a non economist, I feel satisfied that GDP growth is a flaky goal.
Sorry, this was meant for another thread. But I am all for raspberry PIs.
A network of raspberry pi’s is the way to do it, nowadays. Making software to push pictures to a wall collage & manage the pictures is going to be the main challenge for a PhD in EE.
Have you seen this interesting project with the goal of making a digital photo frame look more like a real picture?
http://www.claybavor.com/?p=407
Brian and other Chromecast heroes: I tried this when Chromecast came out. The result was absurdly low-res photos on the TV. Have they fixed it so that the Chromecast stick can download 1080p or 4K resolution photos from Google Photos?
Can you set up Chromecast so that it does this automatically as soon as powered up? Or do you always have to start the slide show from your phone?
Viking is right, buying a bunch of monitors and some raspberry pis will be good for the economy (at least for Amazon, I imagine)
I would use a Chromebit and enroll them all in an enterprise managed domain, and have them all run a kiosk app that does exactly what I want with the photos, manages caching them, etc.
I think it would be important to control the screen brightness through the HDMI input, and have some light sensors so you could adjust the screen brightness automatically on all the displays based on ambient light levels.
If you “live in a world where money is no object” as the article mentions, look at the solution on hackaday.com today.
Anyone who can afford to fly like you do can afford a pallet-load of iMacs.
No intent to inflame class wars here!!
If the displays are set into the wall (a cool idea), how will you deal with heat dissipation? False wall, with passive or active cooling behind it?
I agree that RPi is a good idea. Probably as cheap as having a bunch of graphics cards, and gives you more flexibility. Low power usage, too. But I think RPi is limited to 1080, so that’s a problem if you want 4K displays. There’s a new single board computer coming this year – the PINE64. Might want to see if it can handle 4K.
Chromecast can be setup to automatically display photos from a given Google Photos album as background/wallpaper – no need to fiddle with your phone each time – it’s always on. Feature seems to be called Backdrop.
https://www.google.com/chromecast/backdrop/
When the new Google Photos came out it didn’t have Chromecast support. It does now, but photo resolution seems to be limited to 720p, videos to 1080p.
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/chromecast/xRHI4GUF-u8
I think Amazon’s Fire TV stick might have this same sort of capability, but I haven’t tried it yet.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201453060
Have been considering tiling 9 e-ink displays as 3×3, all driven by a Raspberry Pi or maybe a VoCore (for a lower profile wall-mount) but sorting out the programming and the drive electronics will no doubt be a lot of hassle.)
Also, getting 9 Kindle PaperWhite displays rather than cheap generics, for the higher res and built-in illumination, would be great but much more expensive and much more hassle.
http://vocore.io/
Thanks, Gordon, for the link. I think it is the same as the http://www.claybavor.com/?p=407 link referenced above. I don’t think I am ready to go to this level of effort!
[And, separately, people who fly light aircraft are not generally rich. Earning a pilot certificate costs far less than a kitchen renovation or a new car. Flying as an instructor costs negative $$ (since one typically gets paid). And my regional jet flying experience was the best, with Delta Airlines paying for all of the gas, maintenance, and flight planning!]
You’re talking about digital signage device and a video wall. This could be as “cheap” as a desktop tower PC with multiple outputs to the monitors with the appropriate video wall management software installed to manage what gets displayed where, schedule, rotation etc..
Before Roku got into the streaming device business they used to sell digital signage doohickies. Looks like they may have sold off that part of the company, not sure, I only did a cursory google search. But it looks like there are at least a handful of companies that have apps for a current Roku that would allow you to do the same thing. That would eliminate the large PC.
You could go the raspberry Pi route and I’m sure it would work fine. I don’t know about you but most Raspberry Pi projects I’ve seen have involved more technical know-how or programming knowledge than the average person knows or cares to learn just to do a small project.
I sure don’t have the time to learn another programming language to create a digital picture wall. Do you?
Chris: We have to learn a new programming language every few months if we are to serve dynamic web pages in a framework that won’t result in derision from peers. That’s the beauty of the software world! [I think that we can count any sufficiently complex framework as “a new language” even if theoretically some parts of the code share some sort of base, e.g., Java or Javascript.]
I know a big tv is boring, but can you cheat?
Get a huge mofo tv and build a collage of frames on top of it. You can use modern frames plus recycled frames plus antique frames, whatever.
Or, get a huge mofo tv, build a collection of lightweight frames of different sizes and different materials and textures that can be placed in any orientation on the screen using Elmer’s Repositionable Glue Sticks (or similar), than build a computer vision system that takes your photos and crops and rotates them to fill the frames it sees and stacks them on top of some huge changing background? (Could that be sold to a kid’s museum?)
Not strictly what you’re looking for, but have you seen http://www.rationalcraft.com/Winscape.html? There’s also a similar commercialized version http://www.skyfactory.com/products/luminous-virtual-window/.
If you’re up to having someone write software for Windows or Android to do this, then you can plug a Microsoft Wireless Display Adapter (50 bucks) into the back of each monitor for the video connection between the device(s) and monitors.
EvilKiru: Could you really run 10 or 20 of those Microsoft Wireless Display Adapters in parallel from one Windows machine? How do they even work? https://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/help/support/how-to/adapters/setup implies that somehow there is a device driver on Windows that talks to the display adapter but I’ve got to presume this is through the WiFi modem? Do you have to disconnect from the existing WiFi network? I would think not. But if the adapter doesn’t have built-in RAM to generate the HDMI signal won’t 10 or 20 of them require a crazy amount of network traffic? Maybe there is built-in RAM but I can’t find any evidence of that on the Microsoft site.
WiDi operates independently of your WiFi network.
Yeah, there’s no video RAM in these devices. They’re basically a wireless HDMI “cable”. You need full video support in your laptop or desktop for each WiDi adapter. So in order to drive your primary display and 3 WiDi displays, you need a quad-output video card. To drive 4 more WiDi adapters you’ll need another quad-output video card.
The project might be better served using a collection of special-purpose Android devices. I was mainly thinking of the WiDi aspect as a way to avoid a rats-nest of HDMI cables.
I finally tested connection to multiple WiDi adapters (we have two). Windows will only let you connect to one at a time. So much for that idea…