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A Do It Yourself Screw-up
By Jonathan | February 29, 2008 at 8:38 am
Last week for some reason unknown to anyone, I decided it would be a good idea to take my old laptop and morph it into a digital picture frame. You know what I’m talking about; those picture frames that you plug into a wall while connecting a memory card and then the photo on the LCD alternates so that instead of displaying only one photo, you can display thousands.
My laptop is/was 6.5 years old, so it was pretty much worthless. To make laptop operation even more worthless, the battery had been completely dead for probably three years. Laptop – battery = very small desktop. Also, the power jack was not in the best condition, so if you moved the computer in the wrong direction or nudged the power cord, the darn thing shutoff immediately (when I said the battery was dead I really meant it). So if all of this didn’t make my laptop worthless enough, icing on the cake is that the Ethernet jack was also busted, so I couldn’t even plug it in to get on the internet. Who cares about wireless internet when you still have to plug the thing in to the wall?
Case in point: the computer worked (sort of), but was practically worthless. I don’t even know the last time I turned it on.
Making a do it yourself (DIY) picture frame should be easy enough, right? It seemed that all I needed to do was strip out all the unnecessary hardware (CD-ROM, floppy, battery, hard drive), slap a small version of Linux on a bootable flash drive, and write some scripts to run a slideshow once the computer started. After that all that needed to be done was disassemble the laptop, and mount the final results in a form suitable to hang on a wall somewhere.
I may go through the gory details later, but for now I’ll stick to the basics. After installing multiple versions of Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Slax, Damn Small Linux) multiple times and even attempting a Windows install, I kept running into stupid issues which mostly came down to not being able to boot off the flash drive and not being able to load the software I needed/wanted for the slideshow. After some “research” that consisted of a lot of Google, cussing, and burning CD-R’s, I finally chose Damn Small Linux (DSL). I’m not kidding, that’s the name of this distribution, and it’s really damn small. The download is about 50 megs, and even after I installed some additional software it’s still under 75 megs with no problems. As a comparison, Windows Vista requires over 250 times that much free space before you can even install it.
Cool, right? My laptop now boots off a flash drive, starts a slideshow, and pressing the ‘Q’ key turns the whole thing off. Perfect! Time for disassembly. I should mention that before I began this project I didn’t care about this computer. If I broke it, oh well it was collecting dust anyways. I never realize how many tiny screws held that laptop together. It took a few hours, but I finally managed to strip it all down to the LCD screen, motherboard, processor, USB connectors, power button, and some LED’s that light up when the computer is on. Now for the moment of truth: will this thing boot up after all the destruction? I present to you an abridged script of what transpired:
<----Begin transcript---->
Jonathan takes a deep breath as he presses what’s left of the power button. Some LED’s on the motherboard light up, signifying that the boot process has begun. He looks delighted. The LCD screen displays the BIOS, and then begins to load the operating system.
Jonathan
“Sweet!” he says out loud, thinking to himself that he’s a complete genius and this contraption sitting on the desk, as ghetto as it looks, it actually going to work.
The operating system continues to load, stepping through all of the required steps for Linux to start up. Jonathan is thrilled. The complexion on his face is one of excitement and satisfaction. After about two minutes a loud “POP!” comes from the computer, and a piece of something shoots towards Jonathan.
Jonathan
“Oh s—!!! No freakin’ way!!! Are you freakin’ kidding me?! Son of a b——!!!”
The computer shuts off, the screen goes blank, and Jonathan sits in his chair dumbfounded at the previous events.
<----End transcript---->
Ladies and gentlemen, that “pop” was the sound of me frying my processor chip, and it flying off of the module it was formally soldiered to. For whatever reason, be it ignorance or apathy, I had decided that I didn’t need the heat sink on the processor when I booted it up. For those of you who don’t know, computer processors get very, very, very hot when then are running. 200 degrees is not unheard of, especially for a desktop machine. If the processor doesn’t have any way to dissipate this heat (like a heat sink and fan), it will keep getting hotter and hotter until it fries, burns out, explodes, kills itself, catches on fire, etc. Once a chip does this, it’s game over. This video will show you some examples. I should note that I don’t have volume, so I have no idea what is being said. (EDIT: Turns out it’s just a little techno music)
So this is the current state of my do it yourself digital picture frame from my old laptop computer. I’ll post some pictures later. I’m checking eBay to see if I can located a new processor, but originally I really didn’t want to spend and money on this project. Isn’t $2500 for the computer enough?
Topics: Linux, do it yourself, technology | 4 Comments »
February 29th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
tsk tsk
http://lifehacker.com/359389/give-an-old-laptop-new-life-with-cheap-or-free-projects
March 1st, 2008 at 2:13 pm
You know, some people mass produce such picture frames that you can purchase at a nominal price at most electronics stores. I admire that you wanted to do it yourself but don’t really see it as a valuable use of your time. It makes me wonder if you also do things like grow your own wheat or machine all your own wood screws.
March 2nd, 2008 at 7:48 pm
[...] A Do It Yourself Screw-up [...]
April 17th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
[...] old laptop and morph it into a digital picture frame. You know what I??m talking about those picturhttp://www.lepolt.com/blog/2008/02/29/a-do-it-yourself-screw-up/1256 Unit starts powering up, then shuts down ?? One Laptop Per …The unit starts powering on, and [...]