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Apple Businesses Hardware

Old PowerBook + Hot Glue = Cheap Digital Picture Frame 188

Posted by timothy from the no-subscrption-required dept.
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.
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Old PowerBook + Hot Glue = Cheap Digital Picture Frame More

Old PowerBook + Hot Glue = Cheap Digital Picture Frame

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  • Not to confused with... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hot PowerBook + Old Glue = expensive scrap metal on the floor

  • Market penetration... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 26199 ( 577806 ) on Monday September 09, 2002 @09:45PM (#4224905) Homepage

    Congrats to the author of JPEGView... your program is now running on someone's picture frame :-)

  • Ive been looking for a lowend notebook at my local swap meets, never been able to find one. The swap meets here are populated with hundreds of 486dx33 maybe a pent90 or 2 every once and a while I'll see a mac but they always want too much money for them, never seen a laptop thoe, hmm
  • Seems like a waste of electricity to have it plugged in all the time (you do have to plug in it right?) Why not just have your picture printed and put it in a real frame? I know, it costs money, and it's only one picture -- but you can have as many of them as you want. If it had buttons where you could change the picture that would be cool.
    • I would assume that its set to rotate the pic every so many seconds
    • But you can change the picture and have it cycle pictures automatically. So it's not 'only one picture'. Plus, you don't have the nasty chemicals or waste of traditional processing.

      You can also turn if off at night. Macs can do auto on/off very well.
    • 'cause it would be really easy to add something to change pictures every N amount of time. Of course, given more cpu/graphics power, you could do something like just run ssytem, or repeating time demo loops of your best moments in your online FPS of choice. "Yah, that one there is me when I caught that 10lb bass, and there's the wife and sister-in-law when they were kids, and that's where I sent a rocket flying up l33t_/\/\0r0|\|'s ass to cap the flag..."
    • Actually I was thinking that perhaps a firewall box hidden in the living room w/ a monitor on a shelf might not make a bad picture viewer too. With broadband, the firewall would be on all the time anyway, why not have it display images too.

      Of course, the monitor draws a ton of power making it more wasefull than a headless firewall box but it's an idea.

  • Cool! (Score:2)

    by G-funk ( 22712 )
    That rules! How much can these old powerbooks be had for is the next question? I'd like to do something similar.

  • Software (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tinrobot ( 314936 ) on Monday September 09, 2002 @09:50PM (#4224921)
    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?
    • I was thinking the same thing, the easyest solution would have the adb(? thats what a macs keyboard and mouse port is called isnt it?) ports connected to the outside so you could just plug them in and fix it, of course I have no clue if the duo even has thoes ports for external keyboard or not
      • The Duos just have ports for power, serial (modems/printers/phonenet/etc), modem, and the dock slot.
        • The dock adapter has ADB ports. That means that the dock connector has ADB pins in it somewhere. With a little digging on google, and a little (more) hardware hacking, it would be possible to add an external ADB port to the picture frame. (as well as SCSI I think, so you could mount the picture frame as a drive on your other Mac (or Linux box). Wouldn't that be neat!)
          • ah yes the standalone docks. The Apple Minidock has scsi and ADB (and you can do a Scsi->Ethernet adapter too). Some docks offered just scsi and ethernet, and maybe there's a dock that offers adb.

    • Re:Software (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Sure. Be super-clever during construction and allow a way for a MiniDock to hook up the the guts. Expect to pay almost as much as you paid for the Duo to pick up the MiniDock, but you'll then have Ethernet and and ADB. All the ports you need to fix, alter, change, or otherwise transmogrify your happy Duo. On another note, the Duos were the best sub-notebook ever, and the PowerBook 180c had the best screen ever.

    • Re:Software (Score:3, Insightful)

      by danielsmc ( 577116 )
      Timbuktu is essentially the standard remote control software for Mac, but it isn't free. You could also use VNC, or even Applescript. However, there are limits on what can be scripted, and you would have to find a way to execute them. I don't know if program linking would do the trick, or if they are using a new enough OS, they could use folder actions to execute scripts.

      Or they could have used a laptop with an ADB port for keyboard and mouse.

      Daniel

    • Re:Software (Score:3, Interesting)

      by SethJohnson ( 112166 )


      The article correctly notes that this model of powerbook does not have external ADB. It does have localtalk, which does support network protocols such as TCP/IP, so remote administrative tools such as timbuktu or VNC would work here. It would be dog-slow, but should work fine.
    • Plus, once it's set up, you wouldn't be able to change the slideshow settings.

      I don't see why not. An ethernet, or serial connection would work just fine. VNC for the Mac works great. If you don't want VNC, install Unix on the Mac and use telnet/ssh.
    • The author said that this model did not have an adb (apple desktop bus) port. I would investigate either the connection for the internal keyboard/mouse, or the pin outs for the mini-dock. Perhaps the wires are available to add a port. If you are capable of tearing the computer apart, hot glueing the parts to a frame, and ending up with a working machine, you should be able to add an adb connector to the proper leads.

    • Re:Software (Score:4, Insightful)

      by singularity ( 2031 ) <nowalmart.gmail@com> on Monday September 09, 2002 @10:06PM (#4224988) Homepage Journal
      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.
    • You could get enough bucks for one of those notebooks to almost cover the cost of a small 15" panel which is going to be MUCH brighter than a notebook screen, which is optimized for battery life, not vivid color. Then all you need is a good quality extended VGA cable, a drill, and some creativity to mount a PC whereever you want. It will also look quite nice, and is very easily dissassembled - with proper connectors.

      Hide the motherboard someplace, it's not that difficult - nail it to the wall, stash the case behind a sofa, get a miniATX board - many choices. Configure the hard drive to spin down and load the images into memory, which the slideshow program should do easily. Most older machines will run low-intensity tasks a-ok, espeically under linux, with no cpu fan attached - remove it. PC gear, especially used, is so damn cheap it's almost stupid.

      Then you have a much more functional unit that can do other things.. I was thinking of putting something like this in the kitchen, except set up to display the current weather forecast, the status of my servers, and a couple webcam shots of my workplace so I can see what's going on.

      IMHO this is a pretty poor application for an unwanted notebook. They're great for a email machine or something to surf channel listings in the TV room, though. Especially if you get 802.11 on the go for your house, which I absolutely love.

      My $0.02cdn

      Steve
      • IMHO this is a pretty poor application for an unwanted notebook. They're great for a email machine or something to surf channel listings in the TV room, though.

        Jeezly crow, man, come join the rest of us in the 21st century! I'm a 30 year old dirt-poor undergrad student and even I have a half-dozen laptops WAY better than that gathering dust under my desk. Heck, I have a P166 Dell laptop for email and TVguide on the sofa, and that's almost too lame for my tastes.

        "It'd at least make a good machine to do [simple task]". I hear people say that kind of stuff all the time, but they're usually wrong. A "good machine to do [whatever]" is best defined as the best machine at the bottom of the price curve. Those powerbooks aren't all that great for $100 when one can get a decent IBM Thinkpad with a MUCH better screen for around the same price. At some point older equipment must enter the "crap zone". That is, the machine must one day be too weak to be usefull, but not old enough to be "classic" or "nostalgic". A Duo 280c at 33mhz, 4MB RAM, no PCMCIA (thus no 802.11b, friend), and no SCSI is definitely in the Crap Zone.
    • Several options.

      Install linux on it (yes.. I know its cliche). You can remote access it and do anything you want with it, just make sure you have a network option available.

      Secondly, get a spare laptop, or anything that can access the HD, and just do work on the HD as necessary from a separate computer and "reimplant" it.

      -Restil

  • Some info on my pic frame project (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dgenr8 ( 9462 ) on Monday September 09, 2002 @09:51PM (#4224924) Journal
    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.

    • I did pretty much the same thing, instead using a cheap "Webplayer" Internet Appliance I bought from uBid.com. It interfaces with my Gallery (gallery.sourceforge.net) server, pulling a random picture every 5 minutes. I also loaded some caller-id software on it, so that it displays and speaks the caller-id information when a phone call is received. Best thing is that there are no moving parts, no hard drive or anything. Nice, quiet, useful recycling of some old equipment!
  • zgv is a nice image viewer, very reminscent of the DOS VGA viewers. Slap it onto an old laptop with an old ethernet or slip serial connection and you can be all set...

  • ThinkPad version (Score:5, Informative)

    by HawaiianMayan ( 550426 ) on Monday September 09, 2002 @09:51PM (#4224928)
    Here's another page [interruptx.com] 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!!! :-(

  • Switch (Score:3, Funny)

    by joyoflinux ( 522023 ) <thejoyoflinux AT yahoo DOT com> on Monday September 09, 2002 @09:53PM (#4224935)
    Well, that does it for me. I'm definately going to switch [apple.com] now!

  • v1.1 (Score:1)

    by droopus ( 33472 )
    The whole "set it and forget it" concept is ludicrous, especially if you know Duos. But the concept is cool. Two fixes that make it a lot more appealing (IMVHO)..

    1) Just put an ADB port on the side. This is difficult? Then when you want to change pictures (hey there's a thought) or run the new updated JPEGView, you can.

    2) Above, plus Localtalk/Ethernet, and let it pull pictures off your G4 in the office.

    3) Hack a WiFi card into it, and control it via VNC or Timbuktu.

    NOW you're talking!

    Or you could always turn it into a fishtank. No one's ever done that.

  • eBay (Score:5, Funny)

    by The Wing Lover ( 106357 ) <awh@awh.org> on Monday September 09, 2002 @10:03PM (#4224970) Homepage
    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.

  • I just picked up a Thinkpad 560 on ebay cleap and am doing the same sort of thing, but a little differently.

    Instead of putting the images on the laptop, I just setup an X server with a wireless card and from my main box (which has all the images on it and displays my photo album via a web interface), I dump the image on the remote X display via the wireless connection.

    Now if I could only get wireless power I wouldn't need any cords...
  • ...and thinks it kicks ass! C'mon people, why build something as excessive as a digital picture frame out of something somebody else could actually use.
  • Anyone know any popular brands of x86 laptops that had small screens (say 10" or so) which might be on ebay cheap these days? I'd love to build one of these things, but I don't want to bother with appletalk, etc.
  • It works on iBooks too!! Cool!

  • wow (Score:2, Interesting)

    by HeyZuess ( 35885 )
    When a couple geeks invade New Yankee Workshop! [newyankee.com]

    It does look pretty cool.

  • Touchscreen conversion (Score:3, Interesting)

    by FyRE666 ( 263011 ) on Monday September 09, 2002 @10:15PM (#4225013) Homepage
    It'd be cool to see a hack like this that added maybe a couple of buttons just behind the edge of the frame, or better still a touchscreen. This would give so many more options - such as it doubling up as a front-end to a burglar alarm, web browser, email client, MP3 player or whatever else could be used with minimal controls.
  • Laptop screens cant be on all the time esp old ones I've sceen many a laptops screens getting totaly hosed after being on all night, I left a p200 12tft screen with a friend 2 months after I bought it (2700$)(he dint have a computer and I dint need it at the time) and he turned off power management and fell asleap with it on when he wone up the right side of the screen had melted, I was pissed to say the least
  • I can see the advertisement now.

    Introducing a new picture frame that's:

    -With a built in Fan so you can hear just how hot your picutres are!

    -Visible only from certain angles to keep prying eyes from seeing your precious photos

    -Capable of being infected by a virus or taken out by a trojan. Imagine all the fun and games when some hacker draws a swastika on grandma's forehead

    -Ugly to prop up while showing your eternal love for unnecessary keyboards

    -Runs for almost 2 hours without plugging in!!!

    -Consumes just 15 watts per hour so it only costs you about $50 a year in power costs

    And if you act now we'll throw in a free screen saver to prevent pesky burn in.

    Ummm really, is this progress?

  • Yes I like the idea of VNC, but I don't think this model has a PCMCIA slot, but you can use a Newertech microdock for ethernet networkability.
    Also according to apple-history.com this model only consumes 25W of power, making it pretty cost effective.
  • Many DVD players now support picture cds, so you can just go to ebay and buy one of these 5 inch LCDs [ebay.com] for about $40, stick the LCD into a picture frame, and have a digital picture frame for less money and less work... (did i mention that the resolution isn't great? oh well, we can't have it all).
  • it dosen't run linux! what self respecting ghetto hardware hacker creates a ghetto hardware hack not running linux! :p

    [end scarcasm]

    seriously though.. that frame turned out great, I might consider building one myself, although it would be much more flexable running *nix (uploads via ftp or smb, remote access, etc) but I don't know about getting x to run on a duo, heh
    • I didn't see any mention of the OS. If it's networked and keyboardless, I have difficulty imagining he's running MacOS. (Then again, it looks like that PowerBook is not known to work with NetBSD or Linux.)
  • You've got a very capable little machine there. There are all sorts of other doodads you could use on that for different decorating plans. Having several of these, each running 3D screensavers, around your living room would be quite striking.
  • The picture frame that the Discovery Channel Store sells, made by Ceiva, that is found here [ceiva.com], charges a monthly fee plus initial purchase price. Imagine having a few of these frames for a few years.. adds up quick.

  • Add 802.11 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by commonchaos ( 309500 ) on Monday September 09, 2002 @11:00PM (#4225187) Homepage Journal
    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. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Perdo ( 151843 ) on Monday September 09, 2002 @11:03PM (#4225198) Homepage Journal
    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?
    • Uhm, as a computer, the Duo is a piece of shit. Why bother teaching kids about decades old computers? Might as well get them one of those "My First Computer" toys with the mouse with ears and whiskers.
      • vi.

        three decades old.

        try understanding unix without it.

        included with OS X.

        go to the command line, type vi.

        that is your shiny new mac.

        with a three decade old text editor in it.

        Runs perfectly the same on a duo with NetBSD.

        I used a IIci as a mail server running NetBSD.

        A IIci is the half the speed of a DUO.

        Ask me again what a child can learn on a DUO.

        Running NetBSD/8.1, there is absolutely Nothing a child can't learn on a DUO.

  • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Fuck! (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by mike3411 ( 558976 )
    Fuck! My picture frame crashed!
  • Wasnt there a thing with powerbooks catching fire a while back?

    draw your own conclusions...

  • Here's some I worked on... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tsangc ( 177574 ) on Monday September 09, 2002 @11:28PM (#4225358)

    http://peach.mie.utoronto.ca/people/tsangc/frame10 0-index.html [utoronto.ca]

    I did this with a friend using a PowerBook 100. I also have a PowerBook 520C one too...

    http://peach.mie.utoronto.ca/people/tsangc/journal -frame520running.jpg [utoronto.ca]

    And here's my friend Victor's:

    http://www.chuma.org/projects/pictureframe/ [chuma.org]

    Calum

  • A digital picture frame is already made by a company called Ceiva, you can find out more here [ceiva.com]
    It's only like $100 from some places, and it can either be in single-picture or slide-show mode. Plus, it dims in low light and a button can advance you forward.
    The only catch is that it's a subscription service, and you have to pay like $5 a month, but it's still a nice piece of technology.

  • We did this too, this time using a previous model Ti-book which had been dropped:

    http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~njh/electronics/wal lmount/ [monash.edu.au]

    This ti-book provides a firewall, airport basestation, digital frame and interface to our heating unit, and all for less than 50W continuous power :) The LCD frame stayed on as we agreed it looked nice anyway, and nobody could find a small enough torx screwdriver to open the case.

    And yes, typing on the keyboard is hardwork.

  • http://www.nullgel.com/legoart.html [nullgel.com]

    It's in the shape of a Gameboy.

  • Dynamic web pages on your picture frame (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TheViewFromTheGround ( 607422 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2002 @12:08AM (#4225570) Homepage

    Assuming that you have a network connection, a solution that could run on many operating systems and be very effective would be to install a web server/database combination (like LAMP) and view with a browser that runs in full-screen/near-full-screen mode.

    A simple web design could put your image in the frame's viewing area and hide any OS-junk. With a few scripts in a language like ColdFusion or PHP connected to a database of images, one could easily create a picture frame server. Upload an image to the correct directory via FTP and it gets put in the display queue automatically. Use META REFRESH tags or some other reload method to cycle through images.

    It would be easy and free to use ColdFusion with Apache and MySQL or some other database to make this all happen. There are single IP developer versions of the ColdFusion 5 and MX server available at Macromedia's website [macromedia.com]. Either of these would be enough to set up an image server really quickly with the caveat that ColdFusion 5 is way more stable on Linux than ColdFusion MX. Because you can simply upload to the server via FTP, the single IP limitation isn't so bad. On the other hand, if you already know something like PHP, that might be the way to go.

    One question that I have is this: would be possible to cut up a keyboard and attach new buttons to it that could be mounted on the front and back of the frame and could allow the OS to be rebooted?

    If that's possible, then another advantage of using a browser would be image control. Because Javascript can log keystrokes and then do things. Because you get to pick which browser the system runs on, you don't have to worry about compatibility and accessibility issues. Forward and back buttons mapped to any keys on the keyboard could control the image and those buttons could be mounted on the frame.

    Finally, to respond to the digital divide comment: I work in Chicago's public housing projects (the poorest neighborhood in America) and I've given lots of computers to residents of the development where I work. Honestly, nobody needs or wants a Duo 280c. A good activist and hacker should continue to have fun making and hacking and breaking things while being generous and helping others. Things like this aren't excessive or selfish as much as creative gestures that show that it's people who should be the ultimate beneficiaries of technology.

  • I have couple of Compaq Contura Aero [kinnetica.com] Laptops laying around in storage. It's a really shitty device and got windows 95 installed on it.

    I wonder if it's possible to go through the same conversion with those. Because essentially it's the same concept and the dimensions are the same too, compared with Duo 280

    Or the real question would be, is it worth the trouble? Alternatively I could wipe the windows from there and install tiny linux. Is it a good good idea? I have some time to burn
    • Or the real question would be, is it worth the trouble? Alternatively I could wipe the windows from there and install tiny linux. Is it a good good idea? I have some time to burn

      If you were going to do this with a PC why even bother with Linux? That's overkill. Just install DOS on it and use one of the JPEG/GIF slideshow programs running out of autoexec.bat. If it "crashes" or locks up, just cycle the power and it'll reboot. DOS would take less than 1MB of memory to do this and be quite a bit faster at booting than the Linux version on that machine. www.freedos.org

  • Power cost? (Score:3, Informative)

    by TFloore ( 27278 ) on Tuesday September 10, 2002 @10:50AM (#4228099)
    Just from curiosity, what is the power cost for running this for a year?

    I assume it will be running with the LCD active 24/7. Nothing seemed to imply a normal time-based shutdown (as if anyone here keeps "normal" hours anyway...) so that seems a valid assumption.

    That said, what's the power usage for this, and therefore what is the approximate cost to run this for a year?

    No, I'm not an eco-freak, I just like to know how much something will cost before before I jump in and do it.

    This [apple-history.com] says 36Watts for the Duo 2300C. Okay.

    36 * 24hours = 864watt-hours.
    365 days of this = 315360 watt-hours, about 315kilowatt-hours.

    My power company charges me about 6 cents per kilowatt-hour. This will cost about $19 per year in energy costs for me.

    Amazing, that's actually low enough to be acceptable.
  • ...just a small TFT LCD display would cost you substantially more than that on digikey... it could be worth it to get one of these just for the parts...
  • Anyone still reading this thread?

    I won a crappy old Thinkpad on eBay yesterday. 10.4" TFT screen. The screen is a little bigger than I wanted, and it's only 8 bit, but for 50 bucks even if I end up not liking the results, who cares? Anyone else starting to build one of these?

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