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This page details my conversion of an old Dell Inspiron 8000 into a digital
picture frame to display all my photographs. There are many digital frames
out there, but most of them are outrageously expensive and have tiny screens.
My frame, on the other hand, will have a comparably massive 15" screen! The
basic concept is simple: remove all uneccessary components from the computer,
fit it all in a minimally deep frame, and get the computer to display your
images.
Prepping the Computer
The first step was to gut the computer. If I wanted it to fit
inside a fairly thin frame, I had to remove all the ungainly plastic
pieces, as well as many of the "useful" parts. This was probably the
easiest (and maybe the most satisfying) part of my frame project. With
all the plastic bezeling off, the computer does look rather...naked,
but at least it's smaller. I actually ended up removing most of the
internal components. CD-ROM? Who needs it? Keyboard? For what? Hard
drive? Nonsense...er..nevermind. I removed the CD-ROM (both of them),
keyboard, speakers, network card, trackpad, and battery. That sure slimmed
er up a bit. All that was left now was basically a motherboard, hard
drive, and monitor--perfect for displaying pictures. Actually, in my
frame's early life, it still had some of the extraneous plastic, namely
the bottom plastic bit everything was bolted down to. It turned out
that it wasn't needed after all, and I removed it later on. |
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Making the Frame
Now I had a rudimentary computer, but it still didn't look quite
like what I had imagined. Reorienting the screen so it sat on top of
the main computer body (imagine a laptop with an "inside-out" screen)
helped, but it was lacking that special something...something every
picture frame should have..ah! A frame! Wanting this project to come
out as professionally as possible, I made very careful measurements.
Actually, I bought the wood back home, but the computer was still at
school. Since the miter saw was also at home, I couldn't wait to get
back to school to measure the screen and cut the wood. Behold the power
of the interweb! I discovered that my model "laptop" has a 15" diagonal
screen. I also knew that the Inspiron 8000 has a 4:3 aspect ratio--that
is, the long side and short side are in a 4:3 ratio. Armed with these
two facts, mathematics, and
Pythagorean's theorem, I determined the screen's actual dimensions
to run around 12" x 9". So, I wanted the inside, viewable area of my
frame to be slightly smaller than that--11.5" x 8.5". After extremely
roundaboutly measuring my screen, I was able to make the actual frame.
Picture frames are fairly straigthtforward as far as woodworking goes.
Four sides, two longer than the others (in most cases), all joined by
45 degree joints. Each side of the frame ends up looking like a trapezoid,
with the short base being one of the inner sides of the frame. I cut
all four of my sides out of some frame-looking molding from The Home
Deopt and glued them together with corner clamps. Unfortunately, I have
no pictures of the amazingly exciting gluing process. After the frame
was solidly glued, I drilled a small hole on either side of the corners
and put in a small finishing nail. Filling the nail hole with some wood
filler and sanding down the whole frame prepped it for painting. I used
a flat black spray paint, being sure to prime the frame before painting
it. I didn't only need a frame, though, because the framee in this case
is 3D, not 2D. So, I formed a nice little fence around the back of the
frame to hide all the electronics. This brought the entire project to
somewhere around 3" deep. It could actually be less than that (3/4"
or so) but I didn't want to rip the plank of wood to make it narrower.
With my perfect foresight (ha!) I figured I should cut holes in the
bottom face of the frame to allow one to access the USB ports and power
receptacle. I also cut out a nice hole for the fans, but this really
wasn't neccessary in retrospect because the fans don't actually work...
As for the back of the frame, I left that completely uncovered to ease
all thermal worries.
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Putting it Together
With the frame built and the computer ready to go, I had to come up
with some way to put it all together and attach everything securely.
This is the area which I adjusted most as time went on. Initially, I
simply used some 5-minute epoxy to secure the frame to the laptop screen.
Then, I used hot glue to attach the computer to the screen. This worked
well initially, except the hot glue didn't hold for too long. So, I
epoxied the computer to the screen as well with some small metal brackets
I made. True, this held up quite well--too well in fact. I realized
if I ever needed to do repairs, reinstall the CD drives, et cetera,
I would have to basically rip apart the pieces and re-glue them when
I was done. The best way to attach something to something else is usually
a screw. That way, it's a secure connection and it's a
removeable one. So, I glued some pieces of wood to the backside of the
screen and, using existing holes in the circuit board, screwed the screen
to the computer. To attach that whole thing to the frame, I screwed
in a piece of wood on top of the computer, sandwiching it between that
wood and the frame. Finally, I screwed the computer (again, using existing
holes) to the fence around the perimeter of the frame. This turned out
very nicely and holds up well. |
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Making it Show Pictures
So, after all that work, I essentially had a very small computer. With
no mouse. Or keyboard. What I was basically looking for was a slideshow
screensaver which had some specific capabilities: the ability to randomize
the photos, a 'fade' transition, and a delay of at least 5 minutes.
The slideshow screensaver that comes with Windows XP doesn't have all
that functionality. I did some searching
online and found a program called gPhotoShow. I set the time before
the screensaver starts to its lowest setting, 1 minute. Then I went
into the power settings and told the monitor to always stay on, the
computer to never sleep, and the hard disk to shut off after the minimum
time, 3 minutes. The pictures are set to change every 10 minutes, with
each transition being the slick fade option.
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| I am extremely happy with the results, except for one thing.
At the beginning of this project, the laptop I was using had a "broken"
hard drive. After a fresh XP reinstall, the drive seemed to be in
working order. However, after completing the frame, the drive got
progressively worse and worse until it was limping along worse than
a one-legged dog. The end finally came when the frame got unplugged
and then would not restart. After some work with the drive (freezing,
reinstalling the OS, etc) I could not get it to boot. So, I got my
hands on another laptop drive that worked fine. The downfall? With
this new drive I went from a whopping 40 gigabytes of photos to a
measly 6 possible gigs. Also, something I didn't even think of when
I was installing the new drive: since it is so old, when the drive
spins up, it sounds something like a 747 taking off next to a lawnmowing
convention. Not the quietest thing. At this point, I've got some foam
covering the drive which dampens the sound a bit, but I still have
to turn the frame off at night. Due to this constant on/off cycle,
searching for the old laptop buttons and touching them to the exposed
metal contacts just would not do. So, I installed a most professional
looking on/off switch: |
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Improvements
There are a number of things I hope to change about this frame as time
(and money) permits. I'm trying not to purchase too many parts explicitly
for this project, as I wanted to keep it as low cost as possible. However,
I'm currently on my third LCD ribbon cable, because I foolishly ripped
the first one, and the second randomly got a short in it, creating somewhat
psychadelic effects.
- Scrounge up a quieter hard drive with more storage
- Permanently install a USB wi-fi adapter so I can update the photos
remotely. I currently have to use a flash drive or external hard
drive.
- Install buttons allowing one to jump between pictures
- somehow fit the battery back in, making the frame somewhat portable.
I'm not sure how this could work, as the battery makes the computer
too big for the frame. Maybe reorienting the battery and moving
some connections will work.
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Please sign my guestbook!
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