Neat stuff, digital picture frames

Happy holidays to those that celebrate and a Happy New Year!

Right now I'm a little busy with Christmas preparations, some software projects (home automation of course) and a nice little Atmel Mega128 board/JTAGICE setup I have for a HA hardware/software project I'm working on. I always have too many things to do ;-). Development under Linux, of course. Anyway besides having fun with the hardware I've been thinking about digital picture frames and how the majority of what's available is pretty expensive for what we're given (~$200 to just show pictures). For a little bit more money I should be able to get a really small embedded board that runs Linux and some networking (wireless prefered). With no fans so it's quiet, a wall wart PS so there's no heat, 2G CF instead of a hard disk, USB, Ethernet and thin. This comes close (except for the price): RedPost/Kit - Linux-based, a do-it-yourself home picture frame that seeks hackers/tinkerers/great photographers. It's not exactly thin but it's thinner than a hacked up laptop. At $500 (US?) it's not the least expensive picture frame but it does give you networking and of course with Linux comes all the open source tools like the ftp daemon, Apache, Perl ... and lots more. It shouldn't be too difficult to post not just pictures that rotate through but even video and even text. You should be able to embed text over the pictures like closed caption or something fancier and better looking.