luminescente

I’m in the process of making a digital picture frame out of a laptop.

Already got the laptop, my $100 laptop, a old Toshiba 430 CDT. Pentium 1 at 133mhz, 32mb of ram and a 1.2Gb disk which will get replaced with a Compact Flash card using a CF-IDE adapter. Pity this laptop (including the battery) will get trashed, as it’s still usable but you can’t make an omelette without breaking the eggs.

As for the software, I’ll be using a stripped down linux installation, with X, SSH/SMB daemon and little else.

For future reference, here is one of the better guides I found on the net about this.

I still a PCMCIA network card (16 bit, pre-Cardbus) and later to find a way to enable Rendezvous/Bonjour discovery as I’ll be using DHCP to auto-configure the box, and find a way to use the built-in infra-red port to accept new pictures sent from other laptops or mobile phones. It would be cool to do it using a USB bluetooth adapter but there is no USB on this laptop to add it cheaply.

As for control, I think I’ll use the mouse-wheel and buttons from a damaged mouse and make a iPod-like interface.

I’ll keep you posted!