A scary process, but it resulted in the frame receiving the IR signals with 100% accuracy. Plus it got the wire off the table.
And Finally …
With the frame fully operational and reliable, I began to second-guess my decision to discard the wooden frame and matte. I liked the frame’s low-key black plastic housing. At the same time, the frame housing and the backgrounds of the images both being largely black made it difficult to discern where the images ended and the frame began. I felt they needed more delineation. I hadn’t actually thrown the wooden frame away, so I dug it out of the laundry room along with the white matte that came with it.
Upon attaching the wooden frame and matte, I was disappointed to find that the matte cropped and partially obscured the frame’s LCD display. This was not desirable as I was using pixels pretty much right up to the display’s edges. Well, I had put way too much into this project to leave it half-assed at this point. I disassembled the frame again, took the front of the housing out to the back patio, and went at it with a can of satin white Krylon (so that it could act as a self-matte). I let it dry for a week, and then reassembled. Fortunately, it still worked! With everything back together, however, the images seemed dimmer behind glass. This was perplexing. I supposed a little absorption was unavoidable, but the images were noticeably dimmer. I thought about it for a bit and then realized that the edges of glass are about the same color as the greenish hue I had selected for the bulk of the images’ background artwork. By a stroke of un-luck, I had selected the range of colors most absorbed by the glass! I ended up adjusting the color on all of my background images to move them to a slightly bluer area of the spectrum. With that task behind me, I stamped the project as officially completed.
Images and source code are linked at the right, although I doubt the source code will be of much use to anyone else as it is highly customized for my particular setup.
