I popped into town this morning (mainly to get some milk and bread) and I thought I’d have a quick look around for a wooden frame for my digital frame project.

As look would have it, I found a nice deep 10″x12″ oak frame in Wilkinson’s for only £7. And with the recent VAT reduction, it only cost me £6.85! Hooray!

It’s almost exactly the right size for the LCD panel. I’ll just need to put a card mount in the front and fix the LCD panel in place with perhaps foam or wood along the inside edges.

More thoughts about operating systems

I was thinking about the OS for the frame and it occurred to me that while Puppy Linux works great in the frame, why don’t I look at using FreeDOS instead? I’ve written low-level graphics programs in the past and all my photo frame really needs to do is show a slideshow of images.

If I used FreeDOS (it requires about 2Mb of memory) and wrote a custom slideshow app to run in DOS myself then there’d be more RAM and storage space for the images.

This would limit me to images only (no video for example) and I’d have to write each image type handler myself… is it worth the extra effort? The hardware does have 128Mb of RAM and the CF card can be replaced with a larger one if necessary.