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Last Friday, when cleaning up my home office space I came across an old, unused, partly dysfunctional laptop - a Toshiba Tecra 8200 from the year 2000. It still had Windows 98 SE on it and the internal wifi was not working. The CPU is a Pentium III, 747 MHz with 128 MB of RAM. Just when I was about to throw it away it occurred to me that I might as well use it as a DIY photo frame. So I binged the internet and immediately found a service and repair manual that exactly showed how to take this thing apart. Then I installed Windows XP on it to see how slow it would be. Well, [B}Very[/B} slow. But after booting, which takes about 2 minutes, it is fast enough for a screen saver to display photos. That was encouraging! I inserted an old Linksys PC-Card Wifi card and that worked fine right away.
I went to IKEA and bought myself an 8 euro frame.
Taking the thing apart was easy enough, thanks to the manual.
Things I would not need and thus took out were keyboard, battery and the CD player.
I left the sound PCB in because it also contained the 'On' switch. Furthermore the modem / LAN card was not removed either - although I will probably not use it - because it doesn't take much space or weight anyway and you never know if you need it if Wifi does not work for one reason or another.
Front side:
I added an external button that I had laying around to switch the frame on and off.
Then I wrote a small .Net application (that auto starts after boot) that automatically grabs new HoF photos from http://forum.belgiumdigital.com/f39/ every Tuesday morning and feeds them to the screen saver. Currently weeks 16 to 45 are displayed randomly.
Maintenance is done via RDC from one of my other computers or just via \\computername\c$ in Windows Explorer.
(Sorry voor het engels maar ik heb dit Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V van andere sites waar dit is gepubliceerd .)
I went to IKEA and bought myself an 8 euro frame.
Taking the thing apart was easy enough, thanks to the manual.
Things I would not need and thus took out were keyboard, battery and the CD player.
I left the sound PCB in because it also contained the 'On' switch. Furthermore the modem / LAN card was not removed either - although I will probably not use it - because it doesn't take much space or weight anyway and you never know if you need it if Wifi does not work for one reason or another.
Front side:
I added an external button that I had laying around to switch the frame on and off.
Then I wrote a small .Net application (that auto starts after boot) that automatically grabs new HoF photos from http://forum.belgiumdigital.com/f39/ every Tuesday morning and feeds them to the screen saver. Currently weeks 16 to 45 are displayed randomly.
Maintenance is done via RDC from one of my other computers or just via \\computername\c$ in Windows Explorer.
(Sorry voor het engels maar ik heb dit Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V van andere sites waar dit is gepubliceerd .)
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