Get The Picture?
I have always loved the concept of information presentation as part of your normal environment. There's something incredible about having all your data at your fingertips and not crushed down into a 6" screen. But you have to take your pick of five relatively straightforward constraints - power, price, interactivity, color, and response. No discussion of this would be complete without recalling that e-ink displays exist, in varying sizes, but often not in color, and very expensive for large sizes. We're talking over $2,000 for a 30" display. A 3-color 13" display can be had for a couple of hundred. The amazing thing is that these can run off a trickle charge from a brick for months, no plug required, maybe consuming 3 watts. But also, no interactivity. You could simply mount a 27" thin bezeless monitor on the wall, which does require power (50 watts, let's say) but then you still couldn't interact, only perceive the data. Now, you could buy a 16" portable touchscreen for $90 or a 27" touchscreen for $300. You still need the power, but at least you have touch. These three solutions suffer from one very important problem - you have no computing device. The input goes nowhere, if it exists, and there's no output source. I did once have the idea to take a zero-factor device (like a Pi Zero 2), combine with that brick and one of these, and go from there. With an e-ink display, it would be pretty efficient, likely lasting a week or two between charges. The smaller touchscreen is about 27 watts, which means a big 60000 mAh brick can last about 10 hours, so you still need to plug it in. Another option is a 13" M2 iPad Air, which can be found for $700. At least now you have a computing device, but still only 7 or 8 hours of battery life, so you're plugging it in all the time. So where does that leave us?
Photo Frame
So it turns out that Frameo and Nexfoto and Fullja decided that you could take a 19" or 21.5" or 32" thin capacitive touch LCD and slap a small Allwinner-based compute board that runs Android on the back. Dress it up in a nice picture frame, include some speakers and mounting hardware, and you're done. They've made these fantastically cheap. I picked up a Nexfoto 21.5" frame for $240 delivered on Amazon. I tried this with the Fullja ones and it didn't work, but your mileage may vary. I could have gotten a 32" for $425, but opted to start smaller, I may upgrade down the line.
Then What
Anyone can do this, so don't think you cannot. It's extremely simple.
- Get the frame, unbox it, power it up, go through the setup tutorial and put it on your wifi network, bind it to your phone in the Nexfoto app. Don't worry, you'll soon never see this again.
- On your computer, get Android Platform Tools or Android Studio installed. You really just need adb. For a Mac, you get brew (from the website brew.sh) and then brew install android-platform-tools and you're done.
- Plug a USB-C-to-USB-C cable into your Mac and the port on the back of the Nexfoto.
- Open a terminal and run adb devices. This should list your device. Try other ports or other computers if it doesn't work.
- Now go online and download F-Droid and Uptodown App Store APK to your computer.
- Now in the terminal you can do adb install f-droid.apk and adb install uptodown.apk.
- Now go to the settings area in the frame and tap repeatedly on the build ID and you will be taken to the Android settings
- From here you can open the F-Droid or Uptodown store and download Nova Launcher and Hermit
- Now change the Home Launcher in the Android Settings to Nova Launcher
- Restart the Frame and you will start in Nova now. Lots of configuration options for Nova, take your time to make it your own.
- Open Hermit and add any websites you like. Again, many configuration options here.
And voia, you have a 21.5" wall-mounted Android tablet with as many web apps as you like. Skylight, with a simple calendar, costs $300 for a 15" display plus a subscription fee. So you're getting more space for less, and can use any of the calendaring systems and get the same effect.