Digital picture frame

So folks after having a bit of inspiration in me today, I finally did some more research on building my own digital picture frame. For those of you who may not know, you can actually go out and purchase a picture frame that will display your digital images much like a slide show. In appearance, they look like a regular frame but use digital images instead of print. The advantage is that you can display different images and update them easily via your media card or cd. I had the idea that perhaps an old laptop could be converter into one of these. Well, I got an old laptop like 3 years ago and set it up with the intention of building the frame but it never went anywhere. Until today.

Today I found an awesome site which listed a lot of different versions of this same idea. Using some of what I saw there, with my own ideas, I started on my own tonite. The first thing that needed done was the removal of the display from the laptop. This in itself was scary because if I ruined the displayed, I was fubared. And for awhile, I thought I was.

I got the display off and then turned the laptop on to see if it would work and I kept getting these weird errors. I checked the code list on the net and it said that the battery had gone dead. The BIOS battery. So I checked the battery with my multimeter and sure enough, it was dead. Since I did not have a replacement handy, I wired up a battery from a laser pointer, used a few twist ties for wires (only thing I had that was thin enough) and presto, the machine booted.

I have now been able to move the display so that it sits flush with the backside of the laptop so on one side you have the keyboard, on the other side you have the display. The next part is to permanently mount the display to the back, and put the whole thing into an actual frame. Tamara took one of our frames for our wedding photo and put it on the display just to see how it would look, and man, let me tell you. It looked some freaking nice.

So, we need a real replacement battery, a real frame, some mounting stuff, and I think I am going to look into getting a Wifi card for that laptop (if it will work) to see if I can simply just share the computers C: and place photos on the machine when I want to instead of having to burn them to CD, and copy them onto the machine. Regardless, it will be very nice when it is done. I will have photos and a small page outlining how I did it when I am done.