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Building the WallTop
mramsundar writes "Here is an interesting link that shows how to convert your laptop into something called as walltop. A number of these walltops, when connected, can host a slideshow that can show digitized images."
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This is cool. The author is unclear as to whether or not the CPU fan is left in
place (from the pictures, it appears to be left in place). If it is, then how is the walltop "dead quiet"? If not, how does he keep it cool?
Mirror is located here.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
here
when all you get is a CGI error. But the idea of converting any system into a "walltop" would have a few decent uses in my book.
Talking to Geeks is like eating jello with a chainsaw, interesting, but painful.
I think i'd rather keep my several thousand dollar peice of hardware fully functional and portable, thank you. PLus this requires more than one laptop? I'd rahter either sell my old laptop or hook it up into some kind of cluster.
Philosophy.
no-it-doesn't dept.
I always wanted to take my old laptop and set it on a desk and have it display family photos and stuff like that. I figured I could just tell people that it is a really cool picture frame I bought that looks like a laptop.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
"Wall Side?"
After all its not on the top...
*grin*
Raydude
All pictures are clickable for
full size (800k - 1.5M)
Not too suprising the site didn't last long.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
i don't remember this being posted before . . . .
:)
Maybe I'm just getting used to it.
Pretty Pictures!
Oops. Ignore what I just said. I'm an idiot and its been a long day.
I saw this originally on Newsforge, NOT on Slashdot.
I apologize to Timothy for my stupidity.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
This would be a whole heck of a lot easier with a tablet PC. Fuitsu made some really thin ones that are just becoming obsolete right about now.....
In my lifetime, floor-to-ceiling, transparent displays will be economical. These displays will consume zero power when static.
For those who don't like floor-to-ceiling artwork, imagine picture frames made of this material instead of an LCD screen, attached to a microcontroller and short-range wireless receiver, all for under $20. Having your favorite client over for dinner? Change all the pictures to suit his tastes. Having your mother-in-law over? Put something up to scare her away *JUST KIDDING*.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I assumed from the summary that they'd work together to display something on multiple screens. But they don't, the multiple ones seem no better than single ones. Surely it wouldn't be too hard to use xdmx to get a bunch displaying a single big picture?
I am trolling
No, you're not. If you read the reply to myself and the new entry I just posted, I majorly fucked up. I saw this a couple days ago on Newsforge, NOT on Slashdot.
Forgive me, Father, for I am a worm.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
I'm actually doing something not dissimilar to this at the moment - in my hallway I have two 1960s Libertucci pieces of art - they're about 1" thick, and made of different layers of cardboard cut out in interesting shapes with space between them - I have three knackered old Toshibas, which I'm making into a three layered display to go on the wall - the back one will keep the backlight - they're running off a single PSU, and run gentoo off CF cards, booting off a network image on my server, so I'm just using 32M CF cards... At the moment, I've got all the hardware working, but have yet to mount them in a frame. Will put pictures somewhere once I'm done!
Well, just don't let it happen again. :)
Pretty Pictures!
and then calculate the energy usage and heat generation to serve them.
plus cooling costs/fans and wallmount undercarriage air/coolant ducting.
Hmmm.
Instead, you could just go out and buy a nice painting for what you'd pay for electricity for a month, and sell it for what you paid for it after use.
Or you could buy one of those floor-to-cieling projectors or floor-to-ceiling roll-up maps and mount the images on it - for a lot less.
A more interesting thing would be to live in a mall and get the same basic effect.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
One can only assume you're going to be as secure as any Windows XP computer.
As much as it's nice to have it networked for ease of changing out the photos, I'd much rather see the PC card slot used to operate a PC Card->CF adapter for sneaker-netting the pics to.
It's difficult enough keeping my other Windows boxes up to date without having to worry whether or not my picture frame is running the latest service pack. Surely the benefit gained from the convenience of being able to update the pictures from a remote server is offset by having to monitor for patch compliance.
All in all though, nice idea. I can imagine setting up two of these in my living room to do "something cool" when I plop a DVD and press "Play" on the remote for my HTPC. This would necessitate that pesky network connection, but perhaps all of that hassle could be overcome by using Linux and carefully configuring the picture-frame to drop all unsolicited incoming packets and only allow traffic via port 21 to/from a specific host. Or maybe (and I'm counting on it) someone has a better idea?
"God is dead!" - Nietzsche
"Nietzsche is dead!" - God
...then there was the colleague who came home to find his PowerBook hot-glued to his bedroom wall by his angry ex, running well, but now somewhat less portable...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
I've been thinking about doing something like this myself, except the laptop in question is an old Panasonic Toughbook CF-33 with a touch screen. So I'm thinking of leaving the glass off and simply mounting the screen (only 8.4" - the CF-33 was what was referred to at the time as a "subnotebook," a market that now seems to have disappeared) with a picture matte surrounding it.
I've talked with enough people about this and everyone thinks its a cool idea, so much so, that I have to wonder why a mass-produced product like this isn't available. Get a modern processor and screen, add Bluetooth and WiFi, and you'd have a computer that looked like art!
With this you could totally make the kind of picture they have in the Harry Potter movies. You don't need much computer power. An old 486 should work fine for displaying images.
My approach would be to phantom power the device using a network cable and boot from the network. There are linux distros that would do that and provide an X server.
Some kind of sensor could detect the presence of a viewer. The idea is to provide some kind of interaction. Maybe the picture wouldn't talk back to you, or maybe it could. If it was hooked to the network, a remote box could provide the processing power necessary.
...translucent screens, and PNG wallpaper that makes full usage of their alpha capabilities.
Only when we can make walltops from those (or make translucent monitor mobiles by hanging a bunch of them) can we say "I have seen the top of the mountain...and it is good."
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
There has been a story about a similar project on slashdot more than two years ago.
Here is the original article:
The mini-itx based pictureframe pc:
http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/pictureframepc/
From TFA...
20 Pound Riba Frame...
dam'n thats one expensive frame..
thats $44 Canadian..
I'd rather build a frame myself..
Here's what getting a good digital camera has done for me: I've been making the 11x14 and 20x30 prints that I never could get from my 35mm images, framing them, and displaying them as the works of art that they are.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
MoviX can do this, 3 different distro's 10mb,25mb,50mb
based on Isolinux bootloader and Mplayer
its as simple as
add images/movies > create iso > burn > reboot
even compile it from windows
networking, netbios good hardware support
written in perl, i love it, no hard drive required
could do with polishing at the edges, but it is open source and working
A number of these walltops, when connected, can host a slideshow that can show digitized images.
You submitters need to start learning how to summarize the articles you submit. Reading the above description, I'm completely unimpressed. I don't need a wall of laptops to show digitized images. My current desktop can handle that task just peachy, thank you.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
the little E thingy with two bars is the symbol for Euros, not pounds sterling. 20 Euros is about 30 Canadian dollars.
Uh, does this scream "Fahrenheit 451" to anyone else?
it's more of a tutorial on how to convert your lap into a wall. /great wall of china here
"I think something bounced up inta' ma' undercarriage!"
Must... resist... urge... to rip.. apart... laptop.... geek... impulses... RISING.... AAAAHHHH!!!!!!!
Some years ago the great guys at the Advanced Computing Lab of Los Alamos National Laboratory built this very cool setup with a bunch of Thinkpads running Plan 9:
The Powerwall
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
you'll find old laptops there for under $20.
You know, like caltrops that go on your wall. I thought this was gonna be some amazing new technology to keep those pesky ninjas and/or Spiderman at bay.
Equal a cluster.
And a slideshow.
Honestly, you could have whatever you wanted your cluster to be doing running in the backgrgound and have it once in a while change the image showing on the screen. Is it a web server or is it art?
http://www.andashdesigns.com/
In my humble opinion (and having used BartPE before) I think it might have been a better idea to use one of the abundantly available Linux LiveCD's (Knoppix or variant, Morphix or variant etc) purely for security reasons. A custom built live cd using one of the freely available script sets would probably be the best route to go.
It would be cool to couple these with webcams with an efx processor. Then as you walked by, you could see a modified image of yourself.
I'm picturing like a black and white reflection, or some other snazzy video effect.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
My IBM x20 just had some power issues that actualy required me to take the mainboard out and solder some. I'm not too handy with an iron, but it works now. I also don't trust it enought for critical work.
When I had it conpletely disassembled, I started thinking I could use a friend's CNC machine to build a wall frame for the screen, which is actually a lot thinner once removed from the case. The keyboard is also very thin, and I could fab a base for it as well.
All I need is to wire extension cables for the screen and keyboard, and I would have a very elegant kitchen network client.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Remember the media center room from the Buck Rogers TV show? That stuff is possible now. With today's hard drives, one can store not only hundreds of CD rips, but a few movie rips as well.
I realize I may be in the Slashdot minority when I suggest that TVs should not be in the main-level living room, but I've been looking for something that takes zero floor space for equipment and media, and a wallmount with WiFi to a storage server is just what I want to allow me or any of my guests to pull up any song, music video, or any video short for parties, mood music, etc.
Buck Rogers technology was possible 2-3 years ago, and it's still not available at Best Buy.
over and over... Laptop = updating photoframe... I've got one... for about two years now... sure, he has way more MATT board that I do in mine, but otherwise... ??????
I boot mine, (win95, yeah... it's an OLD LAPTOP! If it ran WINXP, I wouldn't crunch it!) and it use the net command to map drive, and follow the batch file on the server/desktop in the den...
I don't write a page about it... Maybe I should, is this the step 3: before step 4: Profit?
I thought every geek did this years ago...
The nice thing that I used was a little program to hide the cursor... I hate the bloody windows cursor that is there after boot... but the little util int he reg/run hides it after x seconds... so it effectively makes it go by-by... Shareware I think, it wasn't expensive, and yes... It's registered.
I still don't get why this story was posted.. it's not NEW(s)...
bleh, bad mood day.
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
Wow. Another case mod. How clever. Next.
Gosh, it's amazing how the phrase "News for Nerds" has degraded.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
as if having the bsod on your pc wasn't bad enough, now you can hang it on your wall!
Selfmade digital picture frames have become quite common, for example you may try this survey about: How to Make a Digital Picture Frame from an Old Laptop or Notebook.
To fix the problem of attaching the touchpad, he could have just gone to the bios and selected "Halt on No Errors". This way he could do with attacing the touchpad.