Boyink! - Spring Forward on the Web

Here’s an eye test for you—can you spot my old laptop computer in this picture? 

I don’t often get to post project write-ups here on the main blog of Boyink.com - usually my garage creations are more geared towards the Jeep crowd that reads the SSDutch Blog, but in this case the end result is definitely more tech-oriented.

For about $30 I was able to transform an old laptop gathering dust on the shelf into the digital picture frame (or “DPF” for those if you who enjoy TLAs…) sitting on the right end of the mantle.

Now this certainly isn’t an original idea - if you nose around the web a bit you’ll find sites like this that link to dozens of such projects.

In my case the laptop is a Compaq Presario 2100 with what I suspect is a motherboard issue with the PCMCIA slot—the system locks up when trying to use it with a Wi-Fi card.  While a wireless connection would have been nice, since we intended to place the frame on the mantle of our faux fireplace running a network wire to it won’t be a huge deal.

So here’s the basic build process.  After pulling apart the laptop lid to free the LCD screen for measurements, I bought a shadowbox from Michaels and had them make a custom matte to fit the size of the LCD screen into it.  Note that I didn’t actually use the slide out cardboard “box” that came with the shadowbox frame.

I also bought a piece of foam core - and to support the LCD screen in the frame I cut down a piece to fit inside the shadowbox frame, then cut out a hole just the size of the LCD.  Note that I also had to lengthen two wires to the power supply lines for the LCD backlight.

I flipped the shadowbox over, put the glass in, then the matte, then the foam core/LCD screen.  I duct-taped around the edges of the foam-core to hold this all in place.

Then to prevent the laptop from leaning against the LCD (and for a bit of air space behind the laptop), I used some standard plumbers pipe hanger strap:

Next I loaded the laptop, and secured it in place with more of the pipe hanger, attaching to where the hinges for the lid were. 

The shadowbox was big enough that I could also fit in the power supply pack, zip-tied to the pipe hanger.

For a back I used another piece of foam core, with a rectangular hole cut out for ventilation.  I duct taped a piece of window screen over the vent hole:

The tabs provided on the frame work to hold the foam core in place:

Once in place, I can use VNC to remote-control the laptop.

At the moment I’m using Irfanview for the slideshows with it set to change every 15 minutes.  Irfranview requires you to build a list of the images you want in the slideshow however, and I’d prefer something that just watches a specific directory on the network and plays any image found in that directory.

It’s been on the mantle for a day, and so far we’re really enjoying it.  It’s nice to see all those digital pictures that we have but rarely look at.  Definitely worth the $30 investment and a couple hours at the workbench.

Comments are closed, but you can read the comments other people left.

1. Dave J. on January 30, 2007

   Kwel! LOL

2. Joel V. on January 30, 2007

   Mike,

   You should be able to use a screensaver to do play the directory images.  Nice project.

   Joel

3. Michael Boyink (Author) on January 30, 2007

   Huh- - didn’t know that.  Looks like XP only goes up to 3 minutes per pic though.

4. Phil Newton on January 30, 2007

   That looks really cool! At least now I know what to do when my laptop gets too old, although the fan on it can be heard in space.

   I think Picasa (http://picasa.google.com/) can run slideshows from a network directory.

5. Michael Boyink (Author) on January 30, 2007

   I should note - I found a free screensaver for Windows that allows pulling pics from a network directory and also lets me set them for 15 minutes of display each.

   ‘Course, I can’t find the link again now…;(

6. Larry on January 30, 2007

   I have five old Mac Powerbooks with 14” screens and this looks like a perfect way to make use of those old screens!  Wow…  What device do I need to hook up my screens?

7. Michael Boyink (Author) on January 30, 2007

   Hi Larry -

   I’m not sure what you mean by what device….

   Essentially my approach was to remove the LCD panel from the laptop casing, lose the casing, flip the LCD around and plug it back in.

   No extra device needed really…

8. strangesnow on January 30, 2007

   Thankd for your blog!  I used exactly this same style of mounting, shadowbox, etc and mounted a bigger compaq laptop inside.  had to dremel it to fit and it’s a bit frankensteinish.

   I used a USB wifi and Picasa watching both a hard drive folder as well as online.  Since this frame was for my father, it had to update automatically over the web.

9. Lio on February 10, 2007

   Nice job… i’ve done a similar one on Olivetti Echos :
   http://cadrephoto.dkomputer.com/

10. Alex Williamson on May 25, 2007

    Hey, great idea! I was looking to do this kind of thing myself.

    Such a simple way of doing it too - there’s going to be more and more laptops ready for trash or being stocked up (in my case) that this could apply to, the only problem is the beefy casing because of the depth of the components.

    I like it!

    Alex

11. Sean on October 13, 2007

    I built a couple of these for Christmas last year, using older ‘decommissioned’ laptops from work… There’s a great screensaver called Slickr that you can use to automatically download photos from Flickr.  Both of the photo frames I made use Slickr as their slideshow, and can be controlled remotely using the free version of Logmein.

    I’ve also just recently built one on an Ubuntu distro using a wallpaper swapping program called Webilder, that also snags Flickr photos (and is using a free OS)

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