Hardware Geeks

As we all know times are kind of tough right now, money is tight and Christmas budgets are down. 

My personal Christmas Budget is way down, I don’t plan to spend more than 500 dollars this year and that is way way way way way down from last year where I spent nearly $2500. I have limited all my friends to gifts under 20 dollars and only relatives will get anything more than 20 but definitely less than 50.

This brings me to my mother’s gift and my idea for everyone who is on a budget. Mothers sometimes can be hard to please and I personally don’t want to give my mom any kitchen appliances. Sure she may love those but I want to give her something she will ENJOY out of the kitchen, something she will use and can show off to her friends.

So the idea is to create an easy way for her to view my pictures and other family member pictures by simply placing an item of theirs on to an RFID reader. The RFID reader being a TikiTag which you can buy for $49.95 at Amazon.com. I got the Idea from Disney when I saw something similar at their Innovations Dream Home in Anaheim California this past August.

So what I have done is, I’ve bought her a TikiTag for Christmas, made some instructions on how to install it so that she can understand and I have included some pre tagged items. I went to a wood shop and had four 1” wooden spheres made and on each sphere a different name is engraved, and attached to each of the wooden sphere is a RFID tag which will trigger a slideshow of pictures of just the person that sphere corresponds too.

But here is the problem, as I do not always see my mom it is hard to update her pictures on her computer, so what I have done is I have created Albums on my HP MediaSmart server, and configured TikiTag to display the albums on my Server via her web browser. I even created an account for my mother on my HP MediaSmart server so that she can access the folders and add her own pictures if she wants.

I even left her some RFID tags of her own, so that she can tag other things and set them up to display albums or whatever she wants. It is really easy to use Tikitag.

But you don’t need an HP MediaSmart server to do this, you have tikitag open an album on Picasa or Facebook, it doesn’t matter where your album is as long as it is accessible from the web or locally on your network or computer.

As I said above, I got the Idea from Disney, HP had invited me to check out the innovations home they were sponsoring, so yes I stole the idea from Disney but theirs was a bit more complex than what I set up for my mom and what I set up for my self, For example; whenever you placed an item on their RFID reader, all the LCD frames in the home would display pictures relating to the item. The items were souvenirs so they displayed pictures from vacation’s of the family who lived in that home.

So since I travel a lot, and I buy myself snow globes from everyplace I visit (except Atlanta they don’t sell snow globes in the airport). I wanted to tag my snow globes and have it open a playlist of pictures from that specific trip and send them wirelessly to LCD frames I have.

But I can’t find any LCD Frames that would allow for me to do that so if any of you reading this know of any LCD frames that allow for that please let me know. But just because I couldn’t find any frames that did that, I didn’t want to give up on my little project. So I asked Microsoft’s Aaron Coldiron for ideas, and he had a brilliant one. He said why not just create a DVD with Windows Live Photo Gallery?

The mans a genius why didn’t I think of that? So I did exactly that I created DVDs and saved them to my video folders, instead of burning them to a disc.

I then told Tikitag to open that video file on my computer and play it whenever the snow globe corresponding to it was placed on the RFID reader, and it worked flawlessly.

But I wanted it to show the pictures on LCD frames around my house not just on my computer, but as I already said I couldn’t find any LCD Frames that would do this wirelessly or over a wired netwok. So to do what I wanted I had to use LCD monitors.

Here is what I did. I used 2 LCD monitors and wall mounted them. I connected them to my Media Center PC via Ethernet (yes there are VGA to Ethernet adaptors). The Media Center PC is already connected to my television in my living room, and of course the Tikitag is installed on the MediaCenter PC, there is no TV Service on my Media Center PC just use it for Music and Pictures.

I have the two LCD monitors setup to Mirror the main monitor which is the television, so whenever I place one of my snow globes on the tikitag, the television and the two monitors begin to show the DVD I made with the pictures from that trip.

When the system isn’t playing a DVD and is idle a screen saver randomly displays images, so the LCD monitors display pictures at all times which is pretty cool.

It isn’t exactly what I wanted but it will do until some LCD Frames are released that will allow me to do what I want, and for 50 bucks not a bad gift idea if you ask me.

Post Tags: microsoft  disney  tikitag  live photo gallery 

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