Display your photos like they’re in MacPaint

Every millennial knows the exhilarating feeling of going to the computer lab, booting up a Macintosh, and creating beautiful art in MacPaint. The nostalgia meter has broken its dial and is now spinning wildly. If you want to capture that nostalgia in a form suitable for home décor, you can build Mark Wilson’s fantastic LackPaint to display your photos like they’re in MacPaint.

LackPaint is basically a digital photo frame. Except instead of showing boring old family photos in the usual way, it displays them as heavily dithered grayscale images with a MacPaint software border. What you lose in fidelity, you gain in unfettered vintage vibes.

The frame’s enclosure is 3D-printable and building LackPaint only requires two components: an Arduino UNO Rev3 board and a 480×320 LCD shield with microSD card slot. Put the shield on the Arduino and connect a USB cable for power and you’re ready to go.

The Arduino can’t store “normal” photos, so Wilson programmed a Python utility that will convert .jpg images into the proper format and style. Those can then go on the microSD card for LackPaint to read and display.

This is a quick project that you can complete on a Sunday afternoon and it will definitely get attention from anyone who was in elementary school in the ‘80s or ‘90s. 

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