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Tired roadwarrior takes deskjob |
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Written by Tom Mordasky
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Wednesday, 26 January 2005 |
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My old iBook had lived a long and useful life on the road, but I recently upgraded to a new iBook G4. The old book had a host of problems, the case was pretty beat up, the hinges were bent and the cables that ran from the screen to the logic board were damaged. But rather than give up on it I decided to convert it into a compact, kiosk style computer to act as the digital hub for my living room.
I started with the case. My intention was to turn the existing iBook case around on itself, so the screen faced outward. To that end I glued the the back of the LCD lid to the top half of the lower case, i.e. the trackpad. I had to cut a hole into the LCD lid to allow the cables from the screen through.
For the Back of the case the (formerly bottom) plastics needed some work. I decided not to include the battery since the unit is deskbound anyway and that extra battery will come in handy. This leaves a big hole in the case. Fortunately I have LOTS of parts for this machine. I happened to save the plastic cover from an old battery I had discarded. I glued this piece into place with epoxy. There is a hole in the upper left where the laptop's foot was. This hole is pretty much the same diameter as the power button. Since the original location of this button is now covered I decided this was the perfect place for it. I cut the mount from a spare (and broken) trackpad/case assembly, and epoxied it into place. I glued the Sleep LED to this area as well. Below is the outside view of the finished back chassis with the power button in place (left) and the inside view of the battery cover, power button mount and sleep LED (right).
  
The face of the LCD has the two main hinges protruding from the bottom. The hinges had to be cut from the internal metal frame of the LCD and the corresponding holes in the LCD's bezel filled in with plastic.
 
The stand is an old Apple Studio Display "Picture Frame" stand, it was an optional stand available for the original 15" LCD displays from 1998. Here it is repainted white:
The Face of the Chassis is made from a single piece of 1/4" Acrylic, A.K.A. plexiglass. I cut it by hand with a special knife made for the purpose and rounded out the corners with a Dremel.
Below are views of the assembled unit. It is a G3 500mhz with 320mb of RAM, a 60 gig hard disk, a 24x CDRW-DVDR slot loading combo drive and an 11 mbps Airport wireless card. It's primary duty will be as a jukebox for all of my music collection. It also serves as a digital picture frame when not in use and an e-mail/internet station, really it can do anything within the limits of its reasonable (if modest) specs. The beauty of this machine lies in its ability to integrate within my wireless network. It was playing mp3s through my stereo via Airtunes as soon as I had it assembled and powered up.
  
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