Turn your living room into a first-class photographic museum by installing an interactive display. No, this isn’t one of those “dime-a-dozen” convert a discarded digital tablet into a photo frame projects. Rather, you will be working, and viewing, on the cutting edge of technology sporting a rotary digital display housed inside a beautiful shadow box. This display begs viewers to twist the rotary dial and view the embedded photographs.
First things first, however. In an effort of full disclosure, unlike most “photographic projects,” building this interactive display will require a large amount of computer programming. Thankfully, none of this programming requires you to write any code. Just follow along with these simple steps for loading three programs onto your computer, assembling your photographs, and transferring the photographs to the rotary display. And that’s all there is to it.
I Have to Wait How Long?
You will need three pieces of hardware for building your own interactive photographic display:
1. First, and foremost, it might go without saying, but you’re gonna need a computer. Any flavor and any size will work. This truly is a PC-agnostic project.
2. The most important element in building this project is the rotary dial manufactured by M5Stack. Known as the Dial v1.1, but called M5Dial throughout this project, this $34.90 device features a rotary encoder that will control the display of your photographs on its included 1.28-inch display. Furthermore, it can be easily powered by any smart-device charger, PC, or external power bank.
3. In order to showcase the M5Dial inside a professional-looking museum-quality housing, you will need a small shadowbox. Your preferred shadowbox should be large enough to hold the M5Dial, as well as being able to hide the rear mounted power supply. The shadowbox illustrated in this project is the Sunmeg 8×8 Box Frame Display Case. This $8.99 example is ideal for shaping into a first class interactive display.
Getting the Software for Your Interactive Photographic Display
Once you’ve obtained all of the hardware, it’s time to load up your PC with all of the required software:
1. In order to load the image viewing program on the M5Dial, you’ll need the FREE M5Burner application. Just head over to the M5Stack software download site and select the M5Burner installation program that’s suitable for your PC.
2. The program you’ll use for uploading your photos to the M5Dial is PlatformIO Command Line Interface (CLI). You should download this FREE application for your particular PC operating system. Follow these instructions for installing and setting up PlatformIO CLI on your PC. Linux users will also need to install udev rules.
3. The program that is used on the M5Dial for displaying and interacting with your photographs is on this GitHub site. A huge thank you goes to user saitotetsuya (3110) for making this program freely available to any M5Dial owner who wants to build this project. Click the green “Code” button at the top of the screen, download the complete project as a ZIP archive, and expand it in your preferred location.
The Fun Part: Building Your Interactive Photographic Display
Once you’ve assembled your hardware and software, the fun is about to begin. Read these steps carefully and thoroughly before you begin. No special talent or knowledge is required…just a keen sense of adventure and a smidgen of crafting will be needed. Here we go:
Step 1: Prepare your shadowbox
Two things must be done to the shadowbox: remove the clear plastic cover and cut a 45mm diameter hole into the back of the shadowbox. First, remove the clear plastic cover. This plastic must be broken for removal. Be Careful! Next, take a strong, sharp knife and cut a hole in the back. Thoughtfully, M5Stack has provided a template inside the M5Dial box for measuring this opening to the proper size. You must cut through both the cardboard back and the thin trim sheet that covers the cardboard. Set the prepared shadowbox aside, for now.
Step 2: Size your photographs.
The dimensions for the M5Dial display are 240- x 240-pixels. Yes, that sounds small, but your photographs will still look great on this display. Ensure that you save your sized photographs as JPEGs and then copy them into the “data” folder inside that GitHub archive you downloaded in Software step 3, above. Keeping each of your photographs to an approximate file size of 20KB will enable you to load 10-20 photographs into the “data” folder for subsequent uploading to the M5Dial.
Step 3: Install the M5Dial program
Connect the M5Dial to your computer using the supplied USB cable. First, plug the USB-A plug into your PC. Now, you must press and hold the “invisible button” black/red area on the back of the dial that is labeled: BTN while inserting the USB-C plug into the device. Your dial is now in programming mode and the display should be black. Congrats; you’ve just accomplished the trickiest part of this whole project.
Now start the M5Burner application. Locate and select the Dial device along the lefthand side of the main window. Scroll through the list of M5Dial software in the main window and download, “Image Viewer.” Once the download is complete, “burn” the viewer to your connected M5Dial. Inside the Burn Image window, select your USB port connection from the COM dropdown menu. Click burn then close the window on completion and exit the M5Burner application. Disconnect your M5Dial.
Step 4. Load your photographs onto the M5Dial.
During this incredibly lengthy procedure, you’re going to think that your PC has become unresponsive. Please be patient, very patient, depending upon the processing speed for your PC this step could take over 50 minutes to complete. In order to begin, first reconnect the M5Dial to your PC using the same procedure discussed in Step 3, above. Then study the ReadMe_en_US.md file inside the GitHub Image Viewer folder. In the section labeled: Uploading Images to Display, refer to this line:
Execute `pio run –target uploadfs` from the command line.
This is the command that you will need to type into your PC terminal program. Once implemented, this command can take up to 50 minutes to complete. When it is done, all of your photographs will be saved on the M5Dial. Exit your terminal program on your PC and disconnect the M5Dial.
Whew; that was an arduous adventure, but your reward is almost ready. Remove the retaining ring from the M5Dial, slip the dial inside your shadowbox, wiggle the dial through the back plate, and thread the retaining ring onto the dial. Add your preferred power supply to the USB-C port on the M5Dial and wait for the white screen to appear.
Twist the dial and shout with joy as each of your photographs appear on your new, cutting edge interactive photographic display. One side effect that you will notice is that the display isn’t erased before the next photograph is rotated into view. Thankfully, if you’ve properly sized all of your images to 240- x 240-px they will overlap each other and you won’t see any photographic remnants following each wrist twist.
Enjoy.
