Another year, another PC

Every year around this time I get the urge to build a PC or some derivative of it, like picture frames. I probably yearn for the extra heat or the whine of hard disks and fans all around me. Last year I assembled a new desktop PC to replace my aging 7 year old.

 

This year is no different. Except I didn’t need another desktop PC and I didn’t feel like another picture frame (though I do have a laptop lying around for that purpose). So, despite not having any need or purpose, I wandered to good ol’ Newegg and ordered some parts to build a cheap PC. One can always find a reason to use a PC, no?

 

My budget was in the $200-$250 range. Here is what I went with:

MSI barebone – MSI MBOX K9N6SGM-V – $89.99 (case with a uATX mobo with an AMD AM2 socket, nVidia chipset and 400W power supply)

CPU – AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ 2.2Ghz – $74.99 (this is the 65W version)

RAM – OCZ Platinum 2GB (2x1GB) – $45.99 (after $30 mail-in-rebate)

 

I have hard disks (8GB to 80GB) lying around at home, so didn’t need that. Didn’t want a CD/DVD drive, keyboard, mouse, monitor, etc. So, that was it.

 

Total: $210.97 + $20 shipping (for the case) = $230.97

 

 

I just put in a hard disk, plugged in a CD drive and powered it on. Downloaded the Gutsy Gibbon release of Ubuntu and started installing it.

 

I saw Gutsy with Compiz (see video) on K’s laptop recently and was quite impressed with the wobbly windows and how much Ubuntu has shaped up. I had played with the first edition of Ubuntu (Warty Warthog) and briefly with Feisty Fawn on a LiveCD, but Gutsy seemed quite slick. So time to give it a whirl.

 

This will be the second device running Linux in my home – the first was a Series 1 TiVo that is now taking a well deserved break.

 

Is that a laptop stuck on your fridge?

My household had this problem where we would run out of some supply, usually in our refrigerator – not the essentials like milk, but things like yogurt or ginger and other stuff like paper napkins. And when it was time to get groceries or make a visit to Costco, we would start making a list and inevitably forget that light bulb or kitchen towel that we needed. Also, in our neighborhood, every Wednesday is garbage day (when the good folks at Waste Management swing by to collect our waste), and every second Wednesday is recycling day. I can remember the every Wednesday part, but I can never remember which Wednesday is the second Wednesday. This gets more tedious when I skip recycling on some week – that totally messes with my internal recycling clock. We also have doctor’s appt’s for the kids, medicines that one of my tots needed to take on a regular basis, and other things, that we were forgetting to do. We used our work calendar for some of this, but I don’t look at my work calendar on weekends when my party animal kids have their birthday parties and play dates. And I don’t like to mix my home stuff in my work calendar.

So, R suggested that we should have some way to keep a handy shopping list near the fridge and probably use some online calendar to keep track of our home life. And that is how I ended up with a laptop stuck on the door of my fridge to do exactly that.

In my case I picked an old convertible Tablet PC and stuck it with some industrial strength Velcro strips on the door of my fridge. You can find old Toshiba Portege convertibles on eBay for as “little” as $200-$300. Many of them have issues with the digitizer since the first edition Portege’s were quite shoddy, but often you can just rip it open and re-jig the digitizer and get it working again. The digitizer is basically stuck behind the LCD panel and the pressure while writing on the Tablet, I assume, causes it to split away from the LCD or something like that. Remounting the digitizer and using some tape to make it bond more strongly with the panel seems to help. Kinda sorta. Mine worked flawlessly for a while and then gave up. I currently have it without any screws on the case (relieves the pressure I suppose), but I still have one vertical band where the digitizer is dead, but I manage without that strip.

A Tablet PC seems ideal for this since you can just write on it and don’t need a wireless keyboard and/or mouse lying around, and a convertible makes it nice since you don’t have to crack it open to get the LCD panel to face outwards.

Anyways, here is the Tablet PC stuck on my fridge.

I needed a few apps on it to make it useful, primarily a calendar and something to keep track of my shopping lists. I wanted the calendar to be on a service (or server) so I could add appointments from work but I also wanted to add appointments directly on my Tablet. Google, MSN, etc. provide calendar services, but unfortunately none of them support sync, only a read-only view. Thus, apps like Mozilla Sunbird didn’t provide what I wanted. Luckily my ISP serves up Exchange goodness, so I setup my account there and fired up Outlook. I can now forward or schedule appointments from work to my fridge!

For shopping lists, Windows Journal on the Tablet PC is perfect and so is OneNote. The Tablet PC also comes with a sticky notes app which also has voice support, so I could, if I want to, leave a message on my fridge for R (no, we aren’t that geeky).

So, now as things run out in the fridge, we write it on our Tablet PC’s shopping list and just print out the list before we head out grocery shopping. (Though a mini-printer like the ones at the store POS devices would be nice to save paper.) I have also scheduled recurring appointments for things like “garbage day” and “recycle day” and other reminders like doctor appointments. No opportunities for those missed garbage and recycle bins anymore.

And since we seem to spend so much time around the kitchen, I thought it would be good to glance at the fridge to know who was calling when the phone rang rather than having to hunt for the phone. So, I wrote a little service that taps my phone line over a modem (which sits in my garage), picks out the callerid and sends it to clients that are connected to it. The client runs on my Tablet PC and pops up a little window that shows who is calling along with a history of past calls. Geekiness galore.

Next up: A kid-friendly mounting of a Tablet PC with apps for kids to doodle on. I saw a device in the kids area of Ikea in Renton. It is mounted on one side of a little "pillar". It has a touch screen and lets kids paint with their fingers, play the memory game, etc. Would be great to have one of these mounted low on a wall at home. Touchscreen would be ideal rather than a pen/stylus as is with Tablets (my kids might jab the pen into the screen). Lets see, maybe next year’s project. 🙂

 

How many light bulbs does it take to change me?

One. 

Late last year, R got some light bulbs from Costco, to replace three that fused in a period of a week. The bulbs she got weren’t the usual incandescent lamps but compact fluorescent bulbs made by a company I hadn’t heard of before. The lamp claimed to give more lumens of output for a fraction of wattage consumed (14W consumed for a 60W equivalent). I was intrigued. But, I also remembered the fluorescent lamps (tubes to be precise) that were extensively used in India while I was a kid. They flickered to life, required a bulky ballast and a starter. Some of them with lower powered ballasts took a while to come on. I was thus a little curious about these new bulbs which were small (to fit a large ballast etc.) and claimed to start up instantly, and since I try to be eco-friendly, I decided to give them a try. 

The bulbs light up almost instantly (0.25s or so) but are quite dim until it heats up, which is around 50-60 secs. Once heated, it provides a nice bright light, brighter than the equivalent incandescent lamp. 

A few weeks later, I came across an article in Fast Company titled "How Many Lightbulbs Does it Take to Change the World?". That article changed me. 

I took stock of the frequently used lights in my house and that weekend I was in Home Depot where I bought 12 compact fluorescent bulbs. I bought ones made by a company named n:Vision. I wasn’t happy with the ones from Costco and the n:Visions seemed better (product description wise) than the Philips that was in Home Depot. These are definitely better than the ones from Costco. They reach max lumens much faster and so far have lasted longer than the ones from Costco (two of the Costco bulbs died on me within weeks despite the fact that CFLs (compact fluorescent lamps) are supposed to last much longer than incandescent lamps (due to the lack of heated metal filaments)). They also have a choice of light quality from bright white to the dull yellow shadow lighting. 

Despite lighting up fast (relative to CFLs from yesteryear), they are still quite slow compared to incandescent lamps. Thus, in areas where you want instant bright light it isn’t ideal. At home, I replaced all the long-running ones (kitchen, living room, study, external lighting) with CFLs and in cases where I cared about instant light and where there were multiple fixtures, I left one incandescent bulb and replaced the others with CFLs. Gives me the instant light, but I end up saving a lot of power over time. CFLs are perfect for external fixtures which are lit all through the night. I still have a few incandescent lamps at home; those controlled by dimmers (haven’t found CFLs that like dimmers) and some in passageways where I need instant light but don’t remain on for more than a few minutes usually. 

I have 3 external light fixtures that are on through the night. Thus, during winter they are lit for around 10-12 hours every day. These were originally 60W bulbs that I have now replaced with 14W CFLs. Over the last four months, just those 3 bulbs have reduced my power consumption from 216 kilowatt-hours (60*3*10hrs*120days) to 50 kW-h (14*3*10hrs*120days) and probably $15 off my power bill. The bulbs are more expensive than incandescent bulbs (as of now) but last much longer. They also have trace amounts of mercury, so you need to recycle them appropriately. But, totally worth it. 

A few days back, I came across a news article about Australia banning (or phasing out) incandescent bulbs over the next three years. California is planning to do the same. Australia, Wal-Mart (see Fast Company article) and California can make a huge difference. But, I think we all can do our little part before legislation is passed (if at all). 

More about CFLs on Wikipedia.

gPhotoShow config for BartPE

A few people asked me about configuring gPhotoShow for BartPE. I did it a while back and don’t remember it very well, but the following should give you a fair idea.

 

The basic idea is to get PEBuilder to copy the gPhotoShow screensaver into the image it builds and when BartPE boots up, you want it to autostart the gPhotoShow screensaver with the settings you want. BartPE natively doesn’t support screensavers, so you can’t rely on the screensaver being launched at a set interval. Instead what I did is to use the autorun feature of BartPE which lets you run apps on boot up.

 

Here are the steps to create the gPhotoShow plugin for PEBuilder and have it autorun.

 

– Install gPhotoShow and configure the screensaver the way you want it (transition effects, time between transitions, directory of images, etc.) gPhotoShow saves the settings in the registry, which we will use later.

– In the PEBuilder plugins directory, create a directory named gPhotoShow.

– In that directory create gPhotoShow.inf with the following contents:

; gphotoshow.inf
; PE Builder v3 plug-in INF file
; Created by fm

[Version]
Signature= "$Windows NT$"

[PEBuilder]
Name="gPhotoShow"
Enable=1
Help=""

[SourceDisksFiles]
files\gPhotoShow.reg=2,,1
files\gPhotoShow.scr=2,,1
files\gPhotoShow.cmd=2,,1
autorun_gPhotoShow.cmd=2,,1

This specifies the files you want PEBuilder to copy into your BartPE image.

 

– Create a file named autorun_gPhotoShow.cmd in the above directory with the following contents:

@echo off
title Starting gPhotoShow…
call %SystemRoot%\system32\gPhotoShow.cmd
exit

This is the autorun file that BartPE will run after it boots up.

 

– Create a directory under the gPhotoShow plugin directory named "files".

– Copy the gPhotoShow.scr screensaver executable into that directory.

– Open RegEdit and export the tree under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\GPGSoftware into a file named gPhotoShow.reg. Copy this file into the plugin\gPhotoShow\files directory (same as where gPhotoShow.scr is). This file contains the gPhotoShow settings that you configured in step 1.

– Lastly create a file named gPhotoShow.cmd with the following contents:

@echo off
regedit /s %~dp0gPhotoShow.reg
%~dp0gPhotoShow.scr /S

This cmd file is invoked by autorun_gPhotoShow.cmd. It uses regedit to import gPhotoShow.reg into the in-memory registry and then invokes the gPhotoShow screensaver (note the /S parameter).

 

Now, create the image via PEBuilder, after including the gPhotoShow plugin and any other plugins you might want and you are ready to roll.

BartPE framed

Here is my new digital picture frame running BartPE.

 

 

It is quite robust and neater compared to my previous one, which was literally tied down using hanging wire.

I used the backing board from the previous frame (which is solid cork) to mount the motherboard.  This sits atop the LCD panel, thus I added little quarter-inch wood spacers on the underside and cut various slots to let the LCD panel cables to come through, to make room for the hanging wire, etc.

 

Here is the motherboard screwed-in on top of the cork board.  The CDROM drive is on the bottom left which I fastened using some tape and a screw to prevent it from sliding out.  The compact flash PCMCIA adapter is on the bottom right.  Power connector and switch is on top just above the bare CPU surrounded by thermal gunk.

I used the backing board from the frame to seal it all in.  I cut a couple of slots for the hanging wire and a slot to allow access to the power connector and screwed it onto 4 elbows that I mounted on the frame.  I used styrofoam as spacers between the backing board and the board mounting the motherboard.  This not only keeps the backing board straight and firm, but also keeps the motherboard snuggly sandwiched in between.  The PCMCIA eject "button" peeks out from the bottom of the frame allowing easy access to the compact flash card.

 

I think it is solid enough (and neat?) to ship across the country to the intended recipient.

One potential problem with this frame is the lack of cooling for the CPU.  There is no heatsink and I didn’t connect the fan either (couldn’t figure out a nice way to do it).  It is an old 233 MHz CPU (doesn’t heat up like the new chips), but it does get hot.  I set the CPU speed to low in the BIOS and it isn’t too busy, so it should hopefully hold up.  There is good convectional air flow through the back of the frame with the CPU sitting right on top – I hope that suffices.  I have it running for the last 5 days and it hasn’t lost its bearings yet, but if there is a simple way to cool it without the fan I am all ears.

 

A couple of folks mailed me inquiring about the condition of my previous frame.  It continues to hang in my study faithfully displaying my photos.  I recently replaced its hard disk since the old one was driving me batty with the noise, but besides that I haven’t touched it.  It noticed that it isn’t as bright as the new frame I built, partly because of the dust buildup[*] on the inside and partly due to either the lamps or the LCD going a tad dimmer (it has been running continously for almost 1.5 years now!)  Here it is.

 

[*] To prevent dust buildup in the new frame I sealed the gaps between the frame and the glass and between the matte and the glass with tacky glue.  I also sealed the LCD panel to the matte with tacky glue.  Only time will tell if this works as expected.

Customizing BartPE for the digital picture frame

Once I had a barebone BartPE Live CD booting my laptop, the next step was to create a customized version with the photo slideshow viewer, amongst other things.

 

The digital picture frame I built earlier reads photos off a network share over WiFi.  I first tried to do a similar setup, but couldn’t get wireless networking on BartPE to work without manual intervention.  I could boot into BartPE and manually connect to my WiFi network by providing the SSID and WEP key for my network, but couldn’t figure out how to supply the SSID and WEP to the WiFi driver so it connects automatically on boot.  Thus, I decided to build a standalone picture frame that reads photos off a compact flash card.  I used a compact flash PCMCIA adapter that I could plug into the laptop’s PCMCIA slot.  The standalone picture frame should be easier to use by non-geeks and thus is ideal to gift to someone.

 

I then hacked together a BartPE plugin for gPhotoShow, my preferred slideshow application for picture frames.  The plugin instructs PE Builder to copy the gPhotoShow screensaver and a .reg file that has the screensaver settings customized to what I need (slideshow interval, path to photos, the transition effect to use, etc.)  BartPE natively doesn’t have support for screensavers, i.e. launching them at a set interval of inactivity.  Thus, I used the autorun feature of BartPE to launch the gPhotoShow screensaver on bootup.  Screensaver’s (.scr files) can be launched by passing the /s command line param to the .scr file, e.g. "logon.scr /s" will launch the logon screensaver.  The autorun cmd file I wrote for launching gPhotoShow is kinda hacky in that it first imports the .reg file using "regedit /s" and then launches the gPhotoShow screensaver.  A better approach would be to have the required reg settings in the inf file for the gPhotoShow plugin so that PE Builder populates the registry with it, but that was much more work, so I took the easy/hacky route.

 

The only other configuration I needed to do was to set the right display resolution and bits per pixel for my LCD display (1024×768, 24bpp at 80Hz) in plugins\!custom\custom.inf, before burning a CD.

 

It takes around a minute to bootup off the noisy and slow CDROM drive that my laptop has, but once booted it is super silent as the CDROM drive winds down and there are no other moving parts (besides the fan which comes on once in a while).  gPhotoShow launches as soon as BartPE boots up and starts displaying photos off the compact flash card.  To add new photos, I just have to pop out the CF card, add the photos and pop it back in.  gPhotoShow patiently waits while displaying the last photo on screen before the card was popped out.  This is perfect, since if gPhotoShow had barfed on a missing drive, I would’ve had to restart the picture frame each time I added photos to the CF card.

 

Now all I need to do is encase the guts of the laptop in a good photo frame and make it more robust than my last one, so I can gift it.

BartPE is cool!

Creating a BartPE Live CD is easy.  Point the PE Builder application to the Windows installables, select the Plugins you want installed (networking, anti-virus, Remote Desktop, etc.) and click Build.  It picks the minimal set of binaries off the Windows installable and burns a CD (if you choose to do so).  Pop the CD into your PC and boot into BartPE.  It comes with a custom shell called Nu2Shell that lets you launch applications.  You can run all Windows apps as long as the necessary supporting components have been copied over.  For instance, you need to install DirectX support (via a plugin) if your app requires DirectX.

 

There is a "super"-plugin called Reatogo X-PE that adds support for the Explorer shell, plug-n-play, MMC, WMI, etc.  Once you add X-PE, your experience is like pure Windows with the Explorer bar and Start menu, and you can open MMC applications, plug in devices, etc.  A bare minimum BartPE disk (for Windows XP) was around 158MB and with X-PE (including DirectX, PnP, Help, etc.) was around 260MB.  Even if you aren’t making digital picture frames, having a BartPE disk (or USB key-fob[*]) handy would be very prudent.  It is the right tool to have to recover machines infected with spyware or to recover NTFS partitions if your primary disk crashes.

 

There is a large repository of plugins for Microsoft applications and components (like DirectX and WSH) commercial applications (like anti-virus software) and freeware (like Systernals utilities and Firefox).  One could thus create a disk with just the tools and applications one needs.

 

BartPE rules!

 

[*] Tom’s Hardware has a writeup on creating a BartPE USB key-fob.

Here I go again…

Almost a year-and-a-half after building my first digital picture frame, I decided to make one (or two) more of them.  One I will hang either in my study or elsewhere in my house to display portrait images (the previous frame displays landscape-oriented photos) and another I plan to gift to another photography afficionado in my family tree.

 

Just after I got the previous Tecra 8000 from eBay, I got my hands on another one in what was stated as "non-working condition" from a local source.  This laptop was opened by the previous owner in a haphazard way and he/she had ripped out parts from it. It didn’t have a hard disk, memory, CDROM drive or power cable.  It was also missing other parts like the modem, sound card, batteries, etc.  The daughter-board hosting the CPU was without the heatsink and the heat spreader on the chips (CPU and GPU) were ripped out leaving just a bare Intel 266 MHz CPU with some thermal goo on it.

 

I put it all together and powered it, but as expected it didn’t show any signs of starting – no display, no LEDs lighting up, nothing.  I thought it was DOA, but then I put in a stick of memory from my other Tecra, and voila, it booted up.

 

Since it didn’t have an HDD, I decided to try to build a picture frame without using a hard disk.  The previous one I made uses a rather noisy hard disk to boot up Windows, but displays images stored on a network share.  I had the CDROM drive from the previous Tecra which I could use on this one, so booting off CD was the best choice.  Since I assumed I couldn’t get Windows to run off a CD, I tried various Linux distros like Damn Small Linux (DSL), Puppy Linux and finally Ubuntu.  All of them let you create a Live CD.  I wanted to create one with Samba and have it map a drive on my network just like my Windows picture frame and render images off there.

 

Unfortunately, none of the distros I tried supported my graphics card – an old Neomagic.  Thus the best resolution I got was an inadequate 640×480 with low bits per pixel.  I looked around a bit, but couldn’t find drivers for my card.  This was around 8 months back and since I didn’t have enough spare time to tinker I put this on the back burner.

 

Then, a couple of days back I decided to give this another shot, this time with Windows, but without a hard disk.  The options I had were to boot from a CD, over the network or from USB.  Since the Tecra doesn’t support USB boot and network didn’t seem feasible, I looked at other options including an IDE to compact flash adapter (I didn’t know these things existed until I saw one at the local Fry’s).  This will let me have a CF card act like an IDE hard disk.  The only problem with this was that I would need a 2GB to 4GB CF card to host Windows.  I have a few 1GB cards at home, but those wouldn’t be large enough and I wasn’t ready to buy a new card.

 

I then looked at WinPE (Microsoft’s Windows Preinstallation Environment) which is supposed to let you boot into a minimal version of Windows to let you bootstrap an installation.  Of course, this isn’t free.  I then seem to have hit paydirt with BartPE – a preinstallation environment hacked together by an enterprising person named Bart Lagerweij.  It not only is free, but is customizable via "plugins" (and other means) and many have contributed various plugins including those for TightVNC, IrfanView, etc.

 

Time to give this a whirl.

DIY Digital Picture Frame – The frame

With the laptop dismantled, I now needed a frame to mount it in.  A few days before I had completely dismantled the laptop, I had to make a trip to the local Aaron Brothers for framing a painting.  I hadn’t spent any time determining the dimensions that the frame needed to be.  Though, I had a rough idea that I needed a box frame of approximately 1" depth and around 16"x14" dimensions.  I also knew I would need a custom cut matte.  BTW, box frames are those that allow mounting larger objects – baseball gloves, a tennis raquet, etc. – or for mounting pictures at a slight depth.  Thus, box frames, unlike regular frames, have the depth needed to mount a laptop and LCD panel inside.

Aaron Brothers had some kind of sale going on and there I found a 16"x12" box frame with around 1" of depth on a 70% discount.  The frame was black and had a nice finish and it had two good mattes (of course, not cut in the size I wanted).  Post discount it was for $19.95.  There was just one of them, and I snapped it up, hoping I could use it for mounting a photo if it didn’t work for the digital frame.

 

When I bought the frame I didn’t realize that the glass was slightly inset into the frame and the back cover too slid into a groove that was inset from the edge.  Thus, the effective depth was around 0.5" – not enough to contain the LCD panel and the laptop with enough buffer for cooling.  I noticed it only after I started looking at ways to mount the LCD panel inside.

I contemplated getting a deeper box frame and even went to Aaron Brothers and a few other stores, but the frames they had either looked ugly or were too deep and bulky.  None looked as elegant as the one I had.  I thus decided to improvise with it.

In general, I think one can be (and need to be) the most creative in determining how to mount the laptop contents into the frame.  There are various ways in which one can mount it – use foam boards, cork boards, screws, duct tape, etc.  The key things to keep in mind are the ease of opening it if necessary, providing adequate air flow for cooling and providing just enough rigidity.  It is going to be hanging in one place most of the time, so you really don’t need it to be able to withstand a lot of shaking, tilting, vibrating or general misuse.  It should be strong enough so you can treat it like a normal picture frame but not any more.  I considered various approaches before picking a method which used most of the material that the frame had and was cheap and easy while providing good airflow, rigidity and ease of taking it apart when required.  If you are creating a digital frame, you really need to improvise on this.

The frame had a wooden grid inside to keep the two mattes separated.  This seemed like something I could use to mount the laptop onto, while allowing the LCD panel to be in between and well buffered from the laptop base.  The way I was mounting it, the CPU heatsink would be right atop the LCD panel.  I thus wanted a buffer between the LCD and the laptop since I wasn’t sure how the heat from the CPU would affect the LCD (I later found that it does adversely affect it).  The grid wasn’t of the right dimension to contain the LCD panel, so I took it apart and re-arranged it, in the process breaking one of them (though, nothing a little cyanoacrylate couldn’t fix).  I also created a little notch to allow wires for the inverter to pass through.

 

Of course, no matter how I mounted it, I wouldn’t have been able to close the back of the frame, leaving part of the laptop visible.  Though, since the frame is larger than the laptop and since the laptop wouldn’t jut out too much, I figured it would be fairly inconspicuous when I hang it.  This had the added advantage of not requiring me to make provisions for adequate air flow.  If I had closed the back of the frame, I would’ve needed to either drill holes or cut vents so that the fan could circulate enough cool air over the CPU.  Further, I didn’t need to drill a hole for the power cable to snake in.

The plan was to use duct tape to fix the LCD panel to the matte, lay the wooden grid above it and screw in the laptop base to the wooden grid.  After I broke the grid (while rearranging it) I realized it wasn’t strong enough to let me screw in the laptop base and to bear its weight.  I also needed to affix it all to the frame itself.  Thus, I decided to use eye-ring loops on four corners of the frame and literally tie down the laptop base and the grid using a metal wire (the kind used to hang large picture frames).

Here are a few pictures of the eye-ring loops fixed to the frame:

 

I next swung by Aaron Brothers to cut the matte to the size I wanted.  I hoped that they would just re-cut the matte that came with the frame to the new size, thus saving me the cost of buying a matte. But, the gal at Aaron Bros. said that they don’t re-cut mattes since it doesn’t come out straight – I wonder why.  Buying a new matte and having it cut would cost me around $35.  Instead, I picked a beveled matte cutter for $21.95.  Since, I typically need custom cut mattes for my other printed photographs, I hoped to learn how to cut mattes with the new cutter and thus amortize my costs.

Before buying a new matte and cutting it, I decided to try my hand by re-cutting the existing matte.  After some very careful measurements, I managed to re-cut it neatly to the dimensions I needed.  It was my first try at matte cutting and I was pretty happy with the outcome – happy enough to use it as the matte for my digital frame.

I next had to mount the LCD panel to the matte.  It seemed like an easy thing to do, but this task took me the most amount of time to complete.  Getting the panel centered and aligned correctly was extremely difficult.  My first try looked perfect until I connected the laptop and booted it up – the rendered image was slightly tilted.  Note the Start button is clipped in the image below and the screen is slightly tilted to the left.  Of course, it was past midnight, so I decided to do it when I wasn’t as tired – over the weekend.

 

To mount the LCD panel, I started off with packing tape (since I couldn’t find duct tape in the middle of the night) but eventually ended up using insulation tape.  The insulation tape seemed to adhere better and didn’t sag over time when the frame was held vertically.  Here is my first attempt using packing tape – rather ugly.

 

I realized that it would be easier to mount it correctly while having an image on the screen and instead of aligning it from behind, I had to align it while looking at the picture.  I ended up doing this lying on the floor with two pillows below me (for comfort and some height) with the frame, panel and laptop precariously perched on the edge of a table allowing me to see the image on the screen while aligning the panel.  Of course, the task would have been easier if I had a glass-top table.  Once I had something that looked aligned correctly, I would stand up and tape it down only to see that it moved a mm to one side requiring me to re-align it by lying down on the floor again.  It took me 15-20 tries before I got it right and I spent almost 3 hours on it.  I am sure I could do it faster if I try it again.

Below is a photo of the mount after one of the attempts.  I unfortunately don’t have any photos of the panel mounted using insulation tape.  But, just imagine blue tape instead of brown below and you will get the picture. 🙂  Also, pretty obvious, but small strips of tape worked better than one large strip per side like my first attempt.

 

Here it is with the panel, wood frame and laptop above it.  I had the inverter in the gap between the picture frame and the wood frame.  It doesn’t appear to heat up too much and the wood provides good (electrical) insulation to the motherboard.  I also didn’t need to affix the inverter – it just hangs in the gap there.

And finally, here is the laptop tethered to the frame using metal hanging wires.  The wire is tied to the eye-ring loop and it winds over the wood frame and winds through the screw holes in the laptop.  It keeps the frame and the laptop pretty snugly fixed to the picture frame while letting me easily take it all apart when needed.  I also use the eye-ring loops and another piece of hanging wire to hang the picture frame to the wall.  For my final mount, I replaced the packing tape with insulation tape since the former was sagging (very small amounts) when the frame was kept vertically for a while.  The insulation tape adhered better than packing tape to the LCD panel.  Duct tape probably would’ve been the best choice, but I couldn’t find it and I was too lazy to go buy it.

And here it is booted up post framing.

DIY Digital Picture Frame – Dismantling the laptop

After I had installed all the software I needed to have the picture frame running, the next step was dismantling the laptop.  The primary aim was to remove the LCD panel, reverse it and mount it in a photo/picture frame.  Thus, unless required, I didn’t want to dismantle the whole thing, but I ended up doing just that.

After removing the peripherals – CDROM drive and battery – I start unscrewing the visible screws beneath the laptop that I assumed held the case in place.

 

Next, I pried open the case with a flat head screwdriver and unclipped all the plastic clips around the base, but something was still preventing the case from opening.  Consumer electronics typically have screws concealed beneath stickers.  I thus suspected a screw under the ‘Toshiba’ sticker under the laptop, but there wasn’t one.  The next possible location was under the keyboard.  So, I pried out some of the keys and look between them for a screw or two.  None there either.  (BTW, the screws on laptop keyboards come off easily using a flat head screwdriver.  Just wedge the screwdriver under a key and apply a little force upwards and it will unclip.  To put it back you should align the clip correctly and press it in.)

I then noticed a little plastic strip just above the keyboard.  It was just clipped in place and came off easily.  Under it were two screws that held the top of the keyboard panel in place (while the bottom of the keyboard slid under the case).

 

The keyboard is connected to the motherboard via a thin wire strip (the white strip below).  The green strip controls the LED panel on the front (power, hard disk, charge indicator, etc.), the speakers and also the pointer buttons (left and right click).

 

I next had to remove the top of the case, but it appeared to be wrapped around the LCD hinge.  It seemed like I had to get the LCD panel out to get the case to open but that didn’t seem possible since there were no accessible screws on the hinge.  After spending around 10 minutes on this, I realized that all I needed to do was open the laptop all the way until the LCD was horizontal like below.

 

As you can see, the screen hinges tuck into the case sleeves at the ends and one in between.  With the top of the case removed, the insides of the laptop was in plain view.

 

On the top left is the heat sink under which is the CPU and just to the left of it is the fan providing a good air flow over the CPU and GPU.  (The GPU – NeoMagic – is on the motherboard with a thin heatsink above it, above which is the CPU daughter board, above which is the heatsink that is visible above).  Just below the heat sink, in the image above, is the hard disk.  The gray rectangular box on the top right is the modem and below that the PCMCIA adapter.  Between the modem and the heat sink is the sound card.  The green thingy’s on the bottom right with red wires streaking from them back to the motherboard are the NiMH batteries for the CMOS.

Next, I needed to get the LCD panel out, but I noticed the hinges for the laptop cover went under the motherboard.  So, even though I didn’t want to remove the mobo, I had to, so that mounting into the picture frame would be easier without the hinges jutting out.  So, I removed the daughter boards for the modem and audio, detached the LCD cables, had to remove the CPU heatsink and the CPU board beneath it (since it had screws under it that affixed the mobo to the base) and the fan.  Then, after unscrewing all the screws holding the mobo to the case and some meticulous unclipping, I had the motherboard free of the base (seen below with the hard disk plugged in and without the CPU heatsink).

 

I plugged in the hard disk, connected a keyboard and the power adapter for a quick check to ensure everything was still in working condition.  Besides, a few errors (since I had the CMOS battery unplugged), it booted fine.

 

Next, I had to get the LCD panel out of its casing.  Almost all laptop screens have little stickers around the edge of the case and on the front, in the same color as the laptop case.  These little stickers conceal the screws that hold the case in place.

 

I removed these stickers, unscrewed the screws and with some more unclipping using a flat head screwdriver, the casing was out.

A few more screws to get the inverter [*] and hinges out and the LCD panel was free of its casing.

There are two cables that come off the LCD panel.  The top flat strip that connects to the top of the panel, is for the video signal and the bottom cable (to the right above) is the power cable that goes through the inverter (the flat circuit strip connected to the base of the LCD panel) to the lamps that power the LCD backlight.

Now that I had the mobo out, I considered mounting it into the photo frame as-is, but I decided against it.  The laptop cases are well designed to optimize airflow using the fan and it keeps the CPU (and GPU) from overheating.  Since the picture frame would be running 24×7, getting the cooling right was important.  Thus, I decided to mount the mobo back into the laptop base.  It also makes mounting into the picture frame easier imo, since you don’t have to devise ways to mount the mobo, affix the hard disk, mount the fan to the frame to provide airflow, etc.

With the LCD panel out of its case, the next step was finding a suitable frame and mounting the laptop base and the LCD panel into it.

 

[*] LCD panels have fluorescent lamps that power the backlight.  These lamps are powered by AC (alternating current).  The power to the motherboard is DC (direct current), thus the need for an inverter to convert the DC to AC.