It’s grim up north

Chapter 1, the beginning

There’s a lot of DIY-digital photo frame projects described on the internet. I have always thought it would be nice to make one myself, but haven’t really gotten to it. Until about two years ago when I arrived home from work one day, finding my HP OmniBook 6000 laptop trashed by a regretful daughter who had bent the lid a little too far and broken the hinges. The box still worked, but the only thing that attached the display to the rest of the machine was a small cord.

This was the start on a journey that has spanned over two years. The reason why I’m presenting the project today is that I have finally gotten close to finishing the project.

Some time after the incident with the Omnibook 6000 and the lid, I read a lot of DIY-photo frame articles and started disassembling the old laptop (which had then been replaced by a IBM Thinkpad T42 as my best friend in bed and on the couch). Disassembling wasn’t a walk in the park, until I found an official HP service manual for Omnibook 6000/6100 that described exactly what to do, and in which order, to strip the entire device.

When everything was disassembled I put all the parts in a box and stuffed it on top of a shelf, where it rested for about a year, until I felt like continuing the project. I found myself a IKEA Ribba frame that we had but didn’t use. I even went to a framing shop to get a custom paper frame that fitted the hole I had made for the LCD in the frame back board.

I tried different approaches to fitting the motherboard on top of the screen and eventually found the best position. The hardest part was finding out a way to distance the motherboard from the LCD and frame back board, and keeping the package in place, safe for vertical mounting.

The distancing problem was solved by using both distance bolts left over from old building projects and some small nuts and bolts bought at the local hardware store. I used the old holes and used the bolts in a way that distributed the weight of the motherboard and harddrive nicely. Then I waited for my daughter to fall asleep, went into her room and stole some wooden building blocks (I think I was entitled to… after all she broke a fine piece of hardware!). I super glued them to the frames back board to keep everything in position. The pictures shows this in detail.

Chapter 2, disaster strikes

Now it was time to fire up this beauty. The last time I had tested it all the parts were spread out on a desk, just to make sure it would boot without the keyboard connected. So I connected the power and flipped the switch.

Nothing happened.

I double checked that I had connected AC power, tried again. Still nothing. Guess I must have scratched some surface mounted component or short circuited something when trying out the layout. I stuffed everything back in the box and put it back on the shelf.

Chapter 3, a new beginning

This could have been the bitter end for my DIY-Digital Photo frame project. But luckily the opportunity to get my hands on a working HP OmniBook 6100 from work came across, and I took it. This time I was commited to fulfill the project, so I started with the software part.

After researching other projects I finally decided upon using Damn Small Linux. It has a small footprint (even though this piece of hardware is overkill, I like to keep it small). The Digital Hinote VP575 > Picture Frame-project inspired me on some clever solutions.

What I finally came up with was a system that booted quickly, supported my WLAN PCMICA card, and required no interaction whatsoever. The main software components installed on top of the DSL distribution:

feh - Great image viewer with good slide show features, and all features invokable from the command line. I ended up trying out a lot of different viewers until sticking with feh.

Apache/PHP - To create a custom interface from where I can control which images to include in the slide show, as well as shutting down/rebooting the device, and so on. See pictures below.

VNC - To be able to connect graphically to the machine. I enabled VNC access through a Java applet that is available in the web interface.

muddleftpd - A very light weight FTP daemon that was easy to setup and required very little resources. I configured it to use chrooting and only give access to the picture dump directory, where all pictures are held.

samba - To make even easier to put pictures into the loop for the less tech-savvy part of the family I installed samba, and made the picture dump directory accessible as a network share.

Also, SSH access is enabled since I intended to remove the keyboard as soon as I got around to disassemble this machine too.

Continued in next post.