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Powerbook 1400 Digital Picture Frame Conversion |
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Written by Jon Bell
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Friday, 25 June 2004 |
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On March 24, 2004, Jon Bell had a snow day. No one saw it comming. He was dead
bored, with nothing to do. While going through some old stuff, he found a
PowerBook 1400. I said to himself... "gee... wouldn't that be cool to
have my very own digital picture frame?" So he began working and documented it. Follow this
guide to build your own Digital Picture Frame out of an old laptop.
The Mod
If you use a 2400 or 5300 or generally just about anything newer than the 1400,
then you would 1: Have a 32 bit PCMCIA slot, and hence be able to use most wifi cards and 2: Be able to easilly install Debian GNU/Linux(the 1400 is NuBus). A new (used) powerbook
of the sort would probably be about 100 bucks. I then found an 8x10 frame sitting around (A few bucks at some dry goods store), and using a knife, I cut in the extra room for
the LCD. The key is to use a wooden frame that has a lot of extra room so that you can fit in the entire LCD. I used a piece of thick white paper to make a border for the parts
of the frame where the LCD didn't fit. I used some sticky glue to hold on a piece of thin cardboard to the back of the lcd, and used hot glue to adhere the sides of the cardboard onto
the frame (trapping the LCD in place). I pieced out the mobo etc. until it all fit, and then duct taped it all on. Though in one of the pictures you can see that there's a network card
and a hard drive, I quickly got rid of them. I replaced the network card with a 128MB SmartMedia card (to store the pictures), and the hard drive with a 128MB CompactFlash card, which runs a
slimmed down version of MacOS 8. I set up JPEGView to automatically start a slideshow at boot time. It works like a dream! As you
can see in the other pictures, I've since built a full case out of wood. The back is made out of pegboard to give heat a bit of a way out. There are also three large holes in the top to let heat
escape.
The photo gallery
Click for a full size!
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