Introduction: Jagged Alliance Themed Digital Picture Frame

Several weeks ago I came across some videos of a technique of spray painting camo pattern with leaves and branches and I wanted to try that out. I took the last Ikea frame I had lying around and just started spraying. After that, I did not know exactly what to display in that frame and so it just collected dust since then. A few days ago I remembered that I bought an old, really, really cheap digital picture frame on ebay.

Every now and then I play some Jagged Alliance and then the idea of displaying some characters in the frame came to my mind.

This is the short 'ible of how I put this together...

Videolink

Things I used for this project:

  • Ikea picture frame
  • Spray paint - I used brown, grey and black
  • Strip of wood
  • Digital picture frame
  • Regular household tools
  • and a printer

Step 1: Spraying the Frame

As mentioned above this was the first try of spray painting something with holding leaves between the object and the spay can. I think with different branches the result would be better, but for the first try and the purpose I am using it, the color palette and combination worked out fine.

Step 2: Inserting the Monitor

To get the monitor inside the frame I had to remove its' casing by simply unscrewing every screw I could find. That left me with the monitor and the pcb. These together were flat enough to fit in the frame.

I sawed two strips of wood which fit inside the spacer and glued the monitor to the sticks and the sticks to the spacer.

Step 3: Printing the Passepartout and Assembly

Since the opening in the original passepartout was too big for the screen I took a sheet of thin cardboard and cut a new one. But just the white paper around the monitor looked boring, so I printed out a part of the map of Metavira and with some spray adhesive I glued it to the cardboard.

Before the final assembly, I took some screenshots of the characters of the game and cropped them to size, saved these to the sd-card and everything was ready for putting together.

If you power the frame up, every 10 seconds a random face appears in the middle of the map.

Thank you for taking the time reading this short story of a project you can do without fancy tools or skills.