liltux

I have been planning to build a digital picture frame from an old Dell Inspiron laptop for the last few months. I finally got enough time after my exams to start this project. While such projects abound on the net what I had in mind has not been done so far. My idea was to build a photo frame from an old  laptop but the twist was that I wanted to be able to administer it remotely through a custom application that i intended to write in QT4. I first tried going the Juicebox way but that didn’t work so well as I had to convert images into a proprietary format, The screen size is really tiny due to these reasons I decided to convert the old laptop that I had  into a Picture frame/media center/backup device.

The first thing that I did was to research how other people had built their picture frames. I wanted to build this with  minimum modifications such that if I wanted to I could turn this back into its original from again.

I got most of the information i needed from this site. I first referred to the Dell Inspiron 8000 service manual to figure out how to take apart the laptop. you have to be pretty careful with the ribbon cable connection the LCD to the rest of the main board as it is very delicate and can be damaged easily. I ended up damaging this cable but luckily was able to find a replacement on eBay. I ordered the cable and got working on trying to fit the screen onto the wooden frame that I bought at Walmart for $5. The idea here was to remove the plastic bezel and the backing around the screen, flip the screen around and mount it back on the L-shaped frame such that when the laptop is closed the screen would be on the top much like a tablet PC. A wooden frame can then be easily fixed on top of the screen.

here are a few pictures from the disassembly

After  waiting for a week the cable finally arrived and I was able to start with the frame again. since the screen would be covering the keyboard and the trackpad as well as the button for switching on/off the computer. I scavenged the toggle switch from an old paper shredder and soldered it to the track pads on the power switch.

Next I decided to remove the battery pack as it was adding extra weight to the frame, besides it was pretty old and didn’t hold a charge. To test that all this disassembly had not damaged anything critical I decided to power it up and check if Ubuntu could be installed on to this computer. I first tried Ubuntu but this was too memory hungry for the meager configuration of this laptop. I tried Fluxbuntu next but found it lacking some applications that I used frequently. I finally settled on Xubuntu as I had the same thing on my primary laptop.

once the installation was complete, I started to put together the frame. The white cardboard sheet on the frame had to be resized to fit the 15″ screen on the laptop. I started with a similar sized cardboard and did a rough cut, once I was satisfied by the result I transfered the same dimensions to the white cardboard. Next I used a couple of screws and pieces of wood to fit the laptop onto the wooden frame.

Since this model did not come with a WiFi adapter I decided to buy a USB WiFi adapter. I settled on the zyxel G-202 as it is supported in Linux and setup is very easy. I also decided to get a powered USB hub as the laptop has only 2 USB ports and I might decide to hook up more devices or decide to charge other devices of the USB hub. I settled on the Belkin 4 port USB hub. Now that the frame was put together the next step was to configure the frame, I will detail the software configuration in my next post.