Building a living photo frame with a Raspberry Pi and a motion detector @Raspberry_Pi #piday #raspberrypi
Hardware hacker Samuel Clay has posted this great project using Adafruit parts on his blog, ofbrooklyn with instructions on how to make your own!
As you can see above, I built a photo frame that has a few interesting parts. For one, the software which runs the photo frame, which I explore below, keeps the photos fresh from Instagram and Flickr. It then displays a random photo for a configurable six seconds. Secondly, there is a motion detector, built using a PIR sensor, which only turns the monitor on when somebody walks by.
This photo frame is easy to build, but it does take a bit of know-how. Mainly, you should feel comfortable soldering wires and mounting the screen and Raspberry Pi to a board or other object. The hard part for me was figuring out how to turn the monitor on and off through the command line.
Everything else is gravy, from configuring wifi and autoboot/auto-login on the device to attaching and setting up the motion detecting PIR sensor. You can also use the eLinux guide to Raspberry Pi and its handy RPi Hardware Basic Setup wiki.
NTSC/PAL (Television) TFT Display – 3.5″ Diagonal: Yes, this is an adorable small television! The visible display measures only 3.5″ (8.9cm) diagonal, the TFT comes with a NTSC/PAL driver board. The display is very easy to use – simply connect 6-15VDC to the red (+) and black (-) wires, then connect a composite video source to the RCA connectors. Voila, a television display! There’s three little buttons that let you enter a menu system for adjusting brightness, color and contrast. The cable has two composite plugs, AV1 and AV2. AV1 is the default and if AV2 goes ‘live’ it replaces AV1. Be sure to try both RCA inputs if one doesn’t show up at first. Read more.
PIR (motion) sensor: PIR sensors are used to detect motion from pets/humanoids from about 20 feet away (possibly works on zombies, not guaranteed). This one has an adjustable delay before firing (approx 2-4 seconds), adjustable sensitivity and we include a 1 foot (30 cm) cable with a socket so you can easily reposition the sensor or mount it using the two drills on either side. Read more.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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