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Old PowerBook + Hot Glue = Cheap Digital Picture Frame

Posted by timothy on from the no-subscrption-required dept.

option8 writes "Have an old laptop gathering dust? Here's another fun hack from Applefritter - this time utilizing an old Mac laptop (a Duo 280) but could be applied to pretty much anything with an LCD, and turning the guts into a cheap, flexible digital picture frame. Now, off to the flea market to pick up one of them cheap Duos I keep seeing..." As the author points out, this isn't a new idea -- but it's a great step-by-step.

9 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Market penetration... by 26199 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Congrats to the author of JPEGView... your program is now running on someone's picture frame :-)

  2. Software by tinrobot · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Cool idea - but it seems a bit of a risk to configure the software, then rip the laptop apart and hope it all works when it's hot glued back together. Plus, once it's set up, you wouldn't be able to change the slideshow settings.

    Gotta be a more elegant hack for this. Any Mac experts with opinions?

    1. Re:Software by danielsmc · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Timbuktu is essentially the standard remote control software for Mac, but it isn't free. You could also use VNC, or even Applescript. However, there are limits on what can be scripted, and you would have to find a way to execute them. I don't know if program linking would do the trick, or if they are using a new enough OS, they could use folder actions to execute scripts.

      Or they could have used a laptop with an ADB port for keyboard and mouse.

      Daniel

    2. Re:Software by singularity · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The problem is going to be the laptop used - the Duos never had an ADB port for easy connection of an external keyboard or mouse (or a SCSI port to run the computer in SCSI target mode).

      In one of the pictures, he mentions leaving space in the frame to run a LocalTalk cable (the one port the Duos did have), so you could network the Duo to an older Mac.

      The easiest thing to do is to set up the viewer program to run on start-up and automatically start a slide show using a pre-determined folder of pictures. Then when you networked over, all you would have to do is to add/remove pictures from that folder.

      I imagine you might have to use a little AppleScripting to get the slide show set up to automatically run on start-up.

      --
      - (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
  3. Some info on my pic frame project by dgenr8 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Great article. I'm working on a laptop to picture-frame conversion too.

    Mine is an old Toshiba 205CDS with 24 meg running Debian and hooked up to a new flat-panel display, so the display itself is the frame.

    The software is Mozilla 1.1 in full-screen mode. It simply tunes into a page on a web server (could be the same server, but in my case it's not) that serves up refreshes are regular intravals. My friends and family have access to a web page where they can directly upload their pictures into my frame and provide captions. They can also build pages of their own and just sent the URL (this is a big advantage of having a real browser running in the frame).

    The poster was a lot more ambitious than me in many ways. I never even thought of chopping up the laptop and making such a professional-looking package. Now I think at least I'll get rid of the laptop's LCD panel.

  4. Meanwhile some kid in Africa gets a TRS-80... by AELinuxGuy · · Score: 1, Insightful

    ...and thinks it kicks ass! C'mon people, why build something as excessive as a digital picture frame out of something somebody else could actually use.

    1. Re:Meanwhile some kid in Africa gets a TRS-80... by Scrameustache · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Ok, first things first: Get the kid out of the militia he's in (against his will). Then get him fed, cleaned, clothed, a house, some basic education (ABCs, etc) and clean water.
      Then, get him electricity, and then give him an old obsolete computer.

      In the meantime, let people recycle things if they want to, its a good habit to have.

      --

      You can't take the sky from me...

  5. How long will the screen last thoe by Squarewav · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Laptop screens cant be on all the time esp old ones I've sceen many a laptops screens getting totaly hosed after being on all night, I left a p200 12tft screen with a friend 2 months after I bought it (2700$)(he dint have a computer and I dint need it at the time) and he turned off power management and fell asleap with it on when he wone up the right side of the screen had melted, I was pissed to say the least

  6. Add 802.11 by commonchaos · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Adding a 802.11b card would make for all kinds of yummy uses, besides uploading pictures, it would be cool to run that program which sniffs graphics going over the air...