Weekend Project
March 14th, 2009 by Harry Sachz
After cleaning my office, I realized that there is a lot of extra crap that is well beyond the point of obsolescence. For instance, there was an old Gateway laptop that was previously used just for testing Linux distros and typing up papers in Google Docs when I was at school. Since I have just recently graduated, there is now a lot of extra time to work on… well, whatever the hell projects come to mind.
Friday, I had received a ThinkGeek mailer that had a 15″ digital picture frame for over $200. Thinking that’s entirely way too much to spend on something that simply shows off personal photos, I thought about putting the old dust-collecting laptop to some good use. So I rewired it!
I removed the hard drive, DVD drive, battery, keyboard, mouse, case, & misc. hardware and left just the motherboard, wireless card, ram, and 17″ (wide)screen. A 4 gig flash drive was used in place of the hard drive and Ubuntu 8.10 desktop was installed. First off, running an entire operating system on a flash drive is not recommended. Granted there is plenty of room left over after the basic install, but it is almost the slowest damn computer I had ever used (Vista is #1). Anyhow, I uninstalled some unnecessary packages (office software, graphics programs, games, etc.) and was left over with quite a bit of room left for pictures. After which, I installed Samba shares in my Pictures folder, had it connect to my WiFi automatically, disabled the lame-ass “keychain” annoyance, set the computer to run with no power saving settings, and changed the screensaver to display photos in the Pictures folder after 1 minute of inactivity.
Again, the system is pretty slow to boot and has very little horsepower due to the hard drive being replaced with a flash drive, but what kind of power do you need to rotate photos? All things considered, I think it looks pretty good. The plexiglass is butchered, and there are nicks and scrapes all over the clear acrylic, but the pictures are easily visible and it works well.
The lights in the back are coming directly from the power and WiFi lights on the motherboard and the activity light on the flash drive. Looks pretty neat at night. Yes, I know that I’m a nerd for doing this on a Saturday night. Stop judging me.
Tags: frame, laptop, linux, picture, project, weekend
Posted in Personal, Pictures, Tech | Comments (5)
March 15th, 2009 at 9:19 am
Keep up the great work Chris, our students did a digital picture frame two years ago and it took them 5 weeks to gather all the materials and purchase some parts. This is awesome considering you finished it in no time.
March 15th, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Looks cool. Wish I had the time to do something cool…..
April 1st, 2009 at 2:52 pm
I read everything you send me!
April 1st, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Holy crap! That’s awesome! I haven’t heard from you in a while bro. Glad to know that you read all the garbage that I fill inboxes with.
I’ve had such great feedback on this project, despite the overall lack of complexity. It was literally a laptop flipped on top of itself. No big deal, but fun to do!
April 4th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
No big deal? Man, I’d have no idea how to even start going about creating something like this. It’s incredible. The lights from the motherboard and flash drive really make it.