The first step of any project is planning. My loose
plan was to create a digital picture frame that is thin
enough to appear "normal". I wanted it to hang on the wall
and display pictures at a set interval. I also wanted to
avoid ever having to plug a keyboard or mouse into it. It
should be totally quiet and have as few cables running to
it as possible. Once I had listed my requirements, I had to
find a suitable laptop that I could tear apart permanently.
I wanted to make one of these about a year ago but it
wasn't until two weeks ago that I scored some beaten up
laptops from the company I work for. The best of them, by
far, was a Dell Latitude CSx PIII 500MHz with 128MB onboard
RAM. It was labeled as "bad keyboard; other intermittent
failures". Considering the decent speed of the machine, I
thought the risk of "intermittent failures" to be a
reasonable trade-off. I've seen other people make DPFs out
of really old laptops, though. One guy used an
old grayscale 386 that loaded
pictures on a bootable floppy disk. My goal was to
have the thing networked so that it could pull
pictures from the internet. Ideally, I'd like to be
able to give this to someone and have it display my
up-to-date pictures without any intervention. Since I
don't know Linux very well, this meant that I'd have
to run Windows. The Dell was well suited for this,
even if it looked like someone sneezed on it every day
for five years and then used it as a doorstop for
another year. Once I cleaned up the screen, I tested
it to see about these "intermittent failures" but it
didn't have any problems running my slideshow, even
for 20 hours straight. The CPU fan turned on pretty
often (the LOUD CPU fan), which would be really
annoying on the wall in a quiet living room. That was
the first obstacle.
