Bringing the family photos into the kitchen

Once I got into digital photography the number of pictures I took exponentially increased. But while capturing great photos became easier, viewing them remained a frustrating experience, limited to printing them out or having the whole family crowd around a desktop monitor.

So when digital picture frames hit the market a few years ago I was very excited. They looked just like a regular framed photo I’d hang on the wall, but with the key difference that they could flip between many different images — sort of a massive photo album on the wall. Then I read the fine print. In order to use this particular product I would need to shell out a monthly service fee to host my pictures on some Internet server that I would then configure the digital picture frame to dial in over a phone connection. This would be like paying someone lots of money to read you the daily newspaper in Morse code. I decided to wait until digital picture frames came out with broadband access to my home network.

While I was waiting, I came across a blog posting about a do-it-yourself solution and my world changed.

Some enterprising developer had taken apart a laptop, crammed it into a shadow box and set it to boot Windows CE off of a CD. Pictures could be uploaded via a flash or USB drive and a mat board created a nice-looking frame around the laptop’s LCD screen. This guy was definitely on to something.

Finding a laptop to rip apart was easy; we have a handful of them in the house that have been decommissioned to closet space. My first victim was to be a Toshiba Tecra 8100. The screen was damaged so I ordered another one off of eBay, where I noted that I could pick up many more laptops for cheap for future generations of do-it-yourself digital picture frames. 

While I liked the picture frame the blog described, I wanted more functionality.  I decided to use Windows XP Media Center Edition in order to have a rich interface to the music and photos I planned to access through my homegrown device. Furthermore, I wanted to hang the frame in the kitchen so I didn’t want mice and keyboards required to upload or navigate content. Thus, I obtained a wireless network card so the digital picture frame could be remotely managed through Windows Remote Desktop off one of the other computers in my house. But since I didn’t want to have to use one of those computers simply to navigate the content, I threw in a Media Center Edition-compatible remote to the mix.

The destruction begins
I was surprised to find that tearing apart the laptop and configuring all of the peripherals was the easy part. The hard part was getting the picture frame borders perfect. After trying to do the cutting myself a few times, I decided to pay a few extra bucks to get some help from the local picture frame store. They did a great job and I’ll start with them on the next digital picture frame I build.

Here’s a rough outline of how I did it. (Note: If you’ve never taken apart a computer before, this may not be the project to start with. There’s lots of safety information available online and of course, doing any of this will kill your warranty.):

Courtesy Of Travis McElfresh First, strip your laptop ...

Step 1: Completely disassemble the laptop down to where you have the bare LCD screen running off of a nearly bare motherboard. The LCD screen can now flip around and lay flat on top of the mother board, creating a stack less than 2-inches high so that it will fit into a shadow box.

Step 2: Build yourself or have a frame shop build a shadow box to house the broken down laptop. It should be at least 2 to 3 inches deep with the other dimensions variable according to the size of your screen.

Keep in mind you want enough space for a 1 to 3 inch mat border around the screen. How big you make the mat is up to you, though the frame people will provide good advice. Consider having the bottom border be larger than the top by 10 to 20 percent. You will also want to choose a color for both the frame and the mat: I chose a basic black frame with a white border.

Lastly, you will also need to have a piece of glass cut to fit into the shadow box.

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