Panic-inspired Dashboard Made From Photo Frame for ~$150. Code is OSS. | Hacker News Reader

Panic-inspired Dashboard Made From Photo Frame for ~$150. Code is OSS.

bingocardcreator.com

157 pointspatio1142 comments

Working as a full time salaryman AND work on BCC AND hack out little side projects like this?

Patrick, you must have ungodly time management skills.

Just an unsustainable schedule this week, which is why I am quitting. I think I probably hit 80 hours plus commute. Still, midnight to three, midnight to three, plus Saturday was enough for this.

Note that my budget for BCC is usually five hours a week. I am efficient because I have to be. One tactic is to make email check only Must Be Done task. Now I can get away without actually checking due to frame, for mornings without support email.

I am efficient because I have to be.

And therein lies a lesson in how to make yourself productive.

What are you using to monitor delayed job?

Edit: looked at the code. Got the answer :)

You forgot to add his time spent on HN and writing all those awesome comments. 11 comments in the last 4 hours.

Extra points for being able to make $4000/mo from an online bingo card creator. I never, ever, would thought that was possible.

The long tail indeed...

You and me both, believe me. I had grand ambitions of eventually making $200 a month and hopefully learning a bit. I did end up learning a bit.

I did the same thing a few months ago, only my implementation uses an old PSP I had lying around.

http://hackaday.com/2009/03/30/psp-as-a-status-monitor/

Very cool that it's open source, but definitely not as eye catching as the Panic dashboard.

Patches welcome.

Been waiting years to say that.

Looks pretty good to me and it's great that it's a full tutorial.

I'm a designer, and would love to help out. What's the best way to get in touch with you?

If you look closely you can see his gmail address near the bottom of the dashboard frame :)

Awesome. If nothing else, I'm going to put one up that has the "# Days Until I Quit My Job" metric. It's technically the days until my current gig ends and I can work full time on my project, but it will work for me.

Anyone know of a frame that works like this that can work without some third-party service for publishing? I'd like to do something like this on information that's under a strict NDA.

I know of options for that sort of thing (look for "digital signage") but the pricing is not in the same ballpark as a digital photo frame. (In Japan at least, it is sufficiently expensive that I think going the Panic way is probably cheaper if you plan on providing your own programming.)

Yeah, everything I've found thus far it'd make sense to just get a Fit PC and a small LCD - it'd be nice if there was a small frame like this that was hackable (a la the WRT54g) for a small status display.

If you really ever want to get into the digital signage options in Japan, I can bore your brain you with companies with cheap computers/monitors/etc.

But no, you'll never get anything as cheap as these buffalo monitors.

$95 http://www.amazon.com/Kodak-EasyShare-W820-Wireless-Digital/...

Comments suggest you can place any RSS feed into it.

Anyone have this frame?

It looks like a good solution

Sadly, it looks like that gets syndicated through Kodak's website, which isn't kosher for my needs. Sigh.

Here's what you can do: draw an image using GD, I don't know if you have GD in Ruby. PHP has it, I am sure you can hack a little script for that. Feed the generated image the photo frame and Bob's your uncle.

About a year ago, I bought my parents a Phillips digital frame with wireless which (8FF3WMI) could read directly from a feed with no third party software. As long as you don't use the URL anywhere else, no one will be able to find it.

I built a small web interface for it where we can all upload pictures. My family is in different parts of the world so it's nice to send the pictures right into my parents' living room with two mouse clicks.

The frame re-scans the feed about every 10 minutes.

I did something similar with the Philips frame, bought one for my parents and my in-laws and they both have their own dedicated galleries in a self-hosted Gallery2 installation, which allows me and the rest of my family to upload through the web, via email or directly from windows with the 'publish to the web' feature. Works great. Only complaint that I have with this frame is that it reloads every image every time it's shown, rather than caching it. Don't know why, it does cause high bandwidth usage :/

Why are we all doing this with RSS feeds?

I want a frame that serves up a samba folder over a wifi network. That's all. I can make a dozen different things that stuff pictures dynamically into that folder, all the frame needs to do is cycle through them.

The Buffalo photo-frame does the opposite: read a samba folder over a network.

It just ALSO has support for windows frameit, flicker and picasa.

It's a pretty nice piece of hardware.

That sounds perfect. Thanks for the tip.

Chumby, http://www.chumby.com/, is a device that's made to be easily hackable. However, the screen size is small.

Make the chumby into a sleek, passively charged thinclient and you could have something that might compete in the ipad space as a home internet appliance. Make sure you have stuff like a camera, mic, touch screen, accelerometer, decent speakers and you have a lot of possibilities (it sits somewhere and displays a slideshow/clock/widgets, you pick it up and you could take skype calls or video chat directly with another networked device, record something and have it saved on the main pc, etc) The key though would be to make it cheap enough so that you could buy several and network them together in a household/office environment.

The new Chumby makes me think of the monitor Riker and Picard used in TNG. I shall make me a captains chair as soon as I can get a chumby.

7" usb monitor. $99 USD.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/usb-gadgets/c609/

Hmm and $99 for a Sheeva Plug and you have a very nice combo....

That's interesting. I just picked up the next version of up that photoframe at sofmap (6000yen, go get one!) and have been trying to figure out what the hell to do with it other than show my wife's facebook pictures.

I do have two questions though: Does the photoframe automatically update the RSS feed each time it runs through so that your stats are always current? I was under the impression that it only reads the RSS feed once on slideshow startup, and then just keeps display the same info over and over (whether or not it keeps the photos in memory I don't know)

Also, have you figured out a way to get your dashboard to startup when you turn the photo-frame on, instead of having to select windows framit from the menu? That's my most cringe-worthy "feature" of the buffalo frame. I'm actually thinking about calling them and getting them to fix that.

Have you thought about making something like this a startup? A SaaS metrics dashboard service? I deal with a lot of call centers and marketing houses that do big "competitive" dashboards to motivate/track staff and they have to roll their own systems. I'm sure a bunch of tech groups would like to have a Panic-esqe dashboard, but wouldn't want to go through the hassle of doing it themselves. Not sure if it is a huge market, but could be interesting!

Hardware + per customer customization + sales cycle which requires talking to people = I have no interest in that business at all. But if you want it, go for it.

It wouldn't necessarily have to involve any of these. Most of these that I've seen have been cobbled together through Excel, so they have the skills to get everything into Excel. You could offer a product that made really pretty charts around these metrics.

The hardware would be just a 720p TV which they would have to buy and mount - you would just sell teh software.

A cursory search reveals no less than 8 companies already selling this

What companies? I did a search for "LCD Marketing Dashboard" and didn't come up with anything. Not doubting you, just curious what these would be called!

Look up anything related to "digital signage".

I used to work in kiosk software, sort of a similar area.

That's pretty much what my company does: custom digital signage for companies to show energy consumption, work progress metrics, etc etc.

It's going to be a pretty large market, but is still in the burgeoning phase (especially in Nagoya)

Zack's been wanting one of these but with analog gauges, and I just hooked him up with an atmega128 complete dev board with LCD. I have been thinking of the design, and will probably be hitting the junkyard for some old car gauges.

But man, car gauges just don't have the same flexibility as an LCD...nice work Patrick!

Very cool but a little bit of information overload, I would reduce and just put up the 2-3 metrics you really care about.

I have a digital photo frame sitting here doing nothing though, might have to give it a shot.

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