Gothique Doll
New member
Like most people now, all our photos are in digital format and spend their time stuck on a hard drive where we never think to look at them. Since that hard drive is on a server that is always on, it occured to me that it ought to be possible to find a way to display them in random order on a screen somewhere in the flat. After a lot of thinking and googling I hit on the idea of converting an old Advent 7113 laptop that we had into a digital picture frame...
Step one, disassembly. This turned out to be the hardest part! Laptops are really not designed for users to take them apart and when the laptop you want to turn into a bunch of pieces and a pile of screws is an old, generic OEM laptop, guides are hard to come buy. A day with screwdrivers and pliers later and I had this:
A quick test let me know that everything still worked and had survived the process. The frame I am putting this into is just a €20 odd one from Ikea, approximately 50 x 50cm.
Next step, cutting the plywood backplate of the frame to allow the screen to fit through it. This needed to be as snug as I could get it and let the front of the screen sit flush with the surface of the ply, behind the glass of the frame. Having cut the hole, I then placed the screen into the hole with three of the mounting screws replaced into each side. With the assembly face down on the desk, globs of strong epoxy glue were put over the screws. The idea being that these would hold the screen in place on the plywood.
As some of the connections to the motherboard were rather fiddly to completely take apart, and so that I could experiment with positioning it while the glue had 48 hours to harden, I left it all attached with the computer lying rather bare and forlorn to one side. I took this chance to remove the heatsink, clean off the very ancient thermal paste and apply a nice dollop of new paste.
Once the glue had hardened, I taped the covering foil back over the rear of the screen. There are two reasons for this, one was as it shields the screen from interference and the other is that it seemed to be involved with how the wifi aerial worked. I was keen to keep the wifi so as not to have more than one cable. Once this was taped back on, I had a chance to test if the glue had done its job. This was rather nerve wracking but everything held!
Next, using offcuts from the plywood saved from earlier, I built up and glued togther three standoffs to hold the motherboard without it fouling the back of the screen. I then glued the metal plate the motherboard was still mounted to to these standoffs. Note, in this picture the hard drive is still the OS drive. I kept the additional circuit board above the motherboard as this has two usbs (useful for maintenance) as well as the on/off switch for the wifi.
Next, does it even work?!
Phew! It all survived!
I had spent some time before starting the physical building working out how to solve having a slideshow of photos from a networked drive. I tested this in a virtual machine first so I had a pretty good idea that what I was going to do would work, apart from the wifi. I had ended up choosing Ubuntu as the OS for a couple of reasons. Firstly that of all the linux versions I tried it was the easiest for me to get along with and has very extensive online resources. Secondly because the best suited program I had found for the slideshow worked well on it, that program being "gphotoframe". This required that I make the windows share a permanent mount on the OS. I set up a user on the server just for this and a share of only the folder containing all the photograph folders for that user. Then with some file tweaking, was able to make a permanent mount so that gphotoframe would be able to access it. Finally, as the hard drive was proving to be a bit of a heat monster and in order to make it as low power as possible, I turned the install into a live cd iso of Ubuntu and placed it on a 4gb usb stick as a persistant install (meaning that unlike a dvd changes can be made to the OS and they will not vanish if you reboot). The whole thing now could run from the usb stick.
Finally a new piece of card for the front...
And it was done! Originally I wanted to hang it on the wall, but as the cpu still generates up to 70 degrees, I am not too keen to do so. The extra air from leaving it free standing lets it stay around 60 instead and avoids ending up with a heat stain on the wall. When I was setting up, I obviously had a mouse and keyboard attached. Now I use UltraVNC to connect to the desktop when it is on and to start gphotoframe or turn the machine off.
In hindsight, a laptop that is less of a heat monster would have been better, but the whole point was to use what I had to hand. The project was a lot more involved than I expected, particularly getting the folder shares to work in a way that the photo display software was happy with. There are some issues with the live install, but as the OS only has to do one thing and that one thing works, this is not a problem. It does what it is meant to and I am very pleased with how it looks and how it works! My only other tip would be: never paint your nails before taking a laptop apart, it is a complete waste of time XD
Specifications:
Case: Ikea Ribba picture frame
CPU: Celeron M 430 (1.73 GHz downclocked in the OS to 0.43 GHz)
Memory: 1GB DDR2 533MHz SODIMM
GPU: Intel 943GML
Drives: 4GB generic USB stick
Step one, disassembly. This turned out to be the hardest part! Laptops are really not designed for users to take them apart and when the laptop you want to turn into a bunch of pieces and a pile of screws is an old, generic OEM laptop, guides are hard to come buy. A day with screwdrivers and pliers later and I had this:
A quick test let me know that everything still worked and had survived the process. The frame I am putting this into is just a €20 odd one from Ikea, approximately 50 x 50cm.
Next step, cutting the plywood backplate of the frame to allow the screen to fit through it. This needed to be as snug as I could get it and let the front of the screen sit flush with the surface of the ply, behind the glass of the frame. Having cut the hole, I then placed the screen into the hole with three of the mounting screws replaced into each side. With the assembly face down on the desk, globs of strong epoxy glue were put over the screws. The idea being that these would hold the screen in place on the plywood.
As some of the connections to the motherboard were rather fiddly to completely take apart, and so that I could experiment with positioning it while the glue had 48 hours to harden, I left it all attached with the computer lying rather bare and forlorn to one side. I took this chance to remove the heatsink, clean off the very ancient thermal paste and apply a nice dollop of new paste.
Once the glue had hardened, I taped the covering foil back over the rear of the screen. There are two reasons for this, one was as it shields the screen from interference and the other is that it seemed to be involved with how the wifi aerial worked. I was keen to keep the wifi so as not to have more than one cable. Once this was taped back on, I had a chance to test if the glue had done its job. This was rather nerve wracking but everything held!
Next, using offcuts from the plywood saved from earlier, I built up and glued togther three standoffs to hold the motherboard without it fouling the back of the screen. I then glued the metal plate the motherboard was still mounted to to these standoffs. Note, in this picture the hard drive is still the OS drive. I kept the additional circuit board above the motherboard as this has two usbs (useful for maintenance) as well as the on/off switch for the wifi.
Next, does it even work?!
Phew! It all survived!
I had spent some time before starting the physical building working out how to solve having a slideshow of photos from a networked drive. I tested this in a virtual machine first so I had a pretty good idea that what I was going to do would work, apart from the wifi. I had ended up choosing Ubuntu as the OS for a couple of reasons. Firstly that of all the linux versions I tried it was the easiest for me to get along with and has very extensive online resources. Secondly because the best suited program I had found for the slideshow worked well on it, that program being "gphotoframe". This required that I make the windows share a permanent mount on the OS. I set up a user on the server just for this and a share of only the folder containing all the photograph folders for that user. Then with some file tweaking, was able to make a permanent mount so that gphotoframe would be able to access it. Finally, as the hard drive was proving to be a bit of a heat monster and in order to make it as low power as possible, I turned the install into a live cd iso of Ubuntu and placed it on a 4gb usb stick as a persistant install (meaning that unlike a dvd changes can be made to the OS and they will not vanish if you reboot). The whole thing now could run from the usb stick.
Finally a new piece of card for the front...
And it was done! Originally I wanted to hang it on the wall, but as the cpu still generates up to 70 degrees, I am not too keen to do so. The extra air from leaving it free standing lets it stay around 60 instead and avoids ending up with a heat stain on the wall. When I was setting up, I obviously had a mouse and keyboard attached. Now I use UltraVNC to connect to the desktop when it is on and to start gphotoframe or turn the machine off.
In hindsight, a laptop that is less of a heat monster would have been better, but the whole point was to use what I had to hand. The project was a lot more involved than I expected, particularly getting the folder shares to work in a way that the photo display software was happy with. There are some issues with the live install, but as the OS only has to do one thing and that one thing works, this is not a problem. It does what it is meant to and I am very pleased with how it looks and how it works! My only other tip would be: never paint your nails before taking a laptop apart, it is a complete waste of time XD
Specifications:
Case: Ikea Ribba picture frame
CPU: Celeron M 430 (1.73 GHz downclocked in the OS to 0.43 GHz)
Memory: 1GB DDR2 533MHz SODIMM
GPU: Intel 943GML
Drives: 4GB generic USB stick
