The <del>First and Only</del> Buttonless, Touchless Picture Frame

I grabbed the microtouch kit by Rossum from adafruits a couple of months ago and thought that I might want to do something meaningful with it. The hard, cold truth that I eventually realized is that I don't have enough time. So I decided it will be a quick fun hack that takes only an afternoon.

I work at Truman State University as a IT student worker and the office where I work in is rather special because it has big blinds behind a huge glass window. Often my boss would decorate it with pictures of her beautiful kids. I decided I can do something better than that: A fancy, interactive picture frame.

How the office looked like before the revamp.

The plan

I can't put the "picture frame" outside, as there are three problems with it:

Naughty students will screw it sooner or later
I can't hide the wire which is necessary to provide juice to the kit
It's ugly

So the picture frame has to stay inside. And so there will be no funny stuff: No touching, no pushing. So I decided it's time to pull out some fancy tricks with the accelerometer built-in with the microtouch. People would have to slightly knock the glass to advance pictures.

The software

I downloaded the microtouch SDK by Rossum from his git repo and modified the ViewApp. Note that we want it to be the shell also, so the INSTALL_APP macro needs changed a bit.

Editing the source code is trivial, all you have to do is to define a threshold for how sensitive the accelerometer needs to be, then just sample the readings every now and then.

I have created a git repo, feel free to clone and extend.

Next step is to put a FAT32-formatted microSD card into your computer's card reader, use the MicroTouchTool to sideload the picture you want, save the file as INIT.IM2 and shove it into the Microtouch.

The frame

To create the frame, I decided to go cheap and print out a sheet of paper, then cut a hole for the frame: