Old PowerBook + Hot Glue = Cheap Digital Picture Frame

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.

Comments

Software

[tinrobot]

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?

Re:Software

[singularity]

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.

Some info on my pic frame project

[dgenr8]

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.

Re:Some info on my pic frame project

[5alligator]

erm, and just think about having your networked picture frame 0wned and pointing to goatse...:-)

ThinkPad version

[HawaiianMayan]

Here's another page where somebody did this with a ThinkPad. (This one's not so involved; the guy just flipped the keyboard back behind the screen).

Make sure you only try this on a computer you don't care about losing!!! I killed a NEC laptop messing around with this. Those ribbon connectors between the LCD and the motherboard are FRAGILE!!! :-(

eBay

[The Wing Lover]

Easy to find and inexpensive. 280c's are always up for auction on eBay and regularly sell for less than $100.

Not while this story is on the front page of Slashdot, they won't.

Add 802.11

[commonchaos]

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...

Bridge the digital divide.

[Perdo]

Before you turn your laptop into a picture frame, consider giving it to a student or child that will never have a computer of their own without assistance.

How did your first computer change your life?

Would you be where you are today without having had it?