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digital photo picture image frame 386 Digital Picture Frame

"See the world in four colors!"

Materials
1. The laptop

The working laptop poory displaying a JPG A two-color GIF on the screen Extreme close-up of a two-color GIF on the screen

In this case I'm using an old 386 laptop that, so far as I can tell, has a 4-color grayscale screen. Once I knew it still worked I did some research and found the LxPic DOS image viewer and slideshow software. Although this machine had a perfectly capable version of Window 3.1 running I opted for a DOS-based approach to conserve horse power. I downloaded a version of DOS from BootDisk.com (a 6.2 flavor, I believe). Note: When creating a bootdisk from their files, make sure you don't have an explorer window open showing the contents of your floppy drive. The bootdisk installer will throw up its arms and shout obsenities at you via an error prompt.

I threw LxPic and a JPG image on my shiny new DOS bootdisk to see how this baby would perform. Not well. The JPG didn't fully decompress and the result was a very surrealistic rendering that looked like a combination of ASCII art and Atari 2600 graphics. A 4-color dithered GIF seemed to do the trick and didn't look half bad. To get your bootdisk to launch right into a GIF slideshow with 2 minutes separating each image, add the following to the autoexec.bat file:

lxpic.exe *.gif /Y&&

Here's the plan: run everything from floppy to eliminate the need for a hard drive (to keep things quiet) and keyboard. We've already seen with our bootdisk that we can alter the autoexec.bat file to launch LxPic and images in slideshow mode so when we want to change pics another PC can be used to drop different GIFs on the disk.

2. Deconstruction


Time now to tear into the old laptop and figure out exactly what makes it tick. My first guess would swirl around something like a geriatric hampster feeding on moldy cheese but I've been known to be wrong. It turned out that a circuit board with actual transisters and a microprocessor make it up and somehow crammed an entire working computer within a mere 15 lb. package!

Joking aside, I took care to remove the plastic casing, the heavy battery, a small modem daughter card, the hard drive, and the screen proper. Everything in the aforementioned list had to go but the monitor kinda' makes this project what it is. Once separated from the laptop body, I found a set of screws hidden behind a small plate that let me get at the screen itself. I also had to use a knife to get at some small tabs holding the rest of the plastic surrounding the monitor.

The motherboard was now liberated from the plastic case and we had all the basic parts for our digital frame ready to go -- that is if they still work...

3. Design


...which, fortunately, they did. From here I shuffled the pieces of the puzzle about to determine the most effecient setup. I settled on rotating the screen 90° clockwise to rest it directly over the motherboard and floppy drive. I took some measurements and figured that a frame for an 8"x10" photo would provide enough of a face to cover the box I would need to build for all the parts. Since the screen measures almost exactly 5" x 7" I also bought a matte that fits in the 8" x 10" frame and reveals only 5" x 7" for the screen.

Looking at the design from the business side of things you'll see the screen and frame. Below and parallel to that will be the motherboard. The floppy disk will have a slot out the left side of the yet-to-be-built box and a hole for the power cord on the right side. Somewhere in there will also be a power switch after I purchase some solder and a switch from Radio shack. The entire box should measure no more than 11" wide, 9" tall, and 2.5" deep.

4. Construction (updated 2004-05-20)

Building the box won't really be difficult save for the slot needed for the floppy drive and to create some brand of support to keep it raised above the motherboard. On the rear panel of this board is all the connectors (serial, parallel, etc.) but I'm only cutting a hole for the power since the rest are effectively useless on this old of a machine. Were I doing this with a newer laptop I might want access to something like a USB port for a spy/security camera or PCMCIA slot for network capabilities.

Note that I'm using particle board for my box. This comes out of the desire to keep things cheap especially since this is only my first laptop digital picture frame. I recommend medium density fiberboard (MDF) or something with a finer grain so you don't get chips like I have. The uneven cuts are due to a distinct lack of wood-working tools on my part. But the computer-generated image looks precise, right?!

More to come...

Comments (24) | To Top

5/31/2004 @ 3:06pm

Good idea...how's it progressing? I hope that I can scrape up enough tech savvy to do that with an old laptop of mine.

by Jeff Daly

5/31/2004 @ 9:47pm

I'm not sure yet how I might mount the display lcd onto and above the other parts. It has some nice screw holes in its frame that I might use. From there I should only have to get some nice little "L" brackets to hold the pieces of wood together.

There will also need to be another phase of software testing since I'm sure the internal battery on this thing is dead and I may have to reconfigure the bios to boot from floppy. I plan to expand after I'm done with this to a nicer 300Mhz color laptop. As I'm not the handiest with wood and cutting tools this may take a little time.

by KevinFreitas

8/2/2004 @ 2:14pm

I have recently created a site dedicated to resources for creating digital picture frames from old laptops (http://www.likelysoft.com/hacks/pictureframes.html) and I have referenced your site. Please take a moment to check out the site, and drop me a line if you would rather not have your site included, or have a comment. If you don’t mind it being linked and have no comments, you need not reply.

by Andrew

2/25/2005 @ 10:05am

excellent, I did the same some times ago with an old tft color pentium 100 running exactly the same way as you do, and I never could find any other doc or work on the web, happy to finnaly find your site.

by tonypascal

3/1/2005 @ 1:19am

Nice setup. I recently decided to do the same. My wood working skills are not that great so I am having to cheat by using a pre-made Display Box. My question is what did you do in regards to heat? The laptop I am using had a bad fan. Well Bad connections on the board that i cannot determin where the problem is exactly for the fan. I have already tried 3 new fans with no luck on the board. Should I worry about this or just not use any system fans with this setup? Email me with any suggestions.

by Tony

3/1/2005 @ 1:19am

tony@byaw.com

by Tony

4/20/2005 @ 11:30am

I have included a link to your project into Repair4Laptop http://repair4laptop.org/ . Repair4Laptop is dedicated to do-it-yourself laptop repairs as well as re-use of old laptops and notebooks.

by Werner Heuser

7/15/2005 @ 5:38am

Cool thing. Why not FreeDOS? http://www.freedos.org

by 1

7/23/2005 @ 10:15am

I just finished that exact project last night, but with an old ibook. It work's really well, except I opted for a media card reader in series with a hd. The HD loads the OS while the media card reader (set as a slave drive using a HD connection converter) is set to hold pictures. I'd suggest some nice frame around the outside of the screen... held in with some metal duct tape (not the regular kind) for some extra heat dissipation. Nice job.

by Arcygenical

8/12/2005 @ 8:52am

Really nice! i just made one last night out of an old NEC Versa 100mhz, however i didn't use a actual dos disk, just made a bootable cd with nero and resized my whole picture collection to 800*600 and tossed it on the cd. only downside is that you have to run the command because of the way that nero creates the cd. i would prefer to use linux, but for ease this is just too easy!!! thanks for the idea's and the info... dan

by Dan Dacvus

9/24/2005 @ 11:36am

i need about laptop information.
thank you.
byeeeee

by mustaba

10/8/2005 @ 6:06pm

gracias el programa lxpic funciona muy bien saludos desde argentina

by virtual

11/25/2005 @ 3:52am

Is it possible to use an ide to CF adpator and have a Compact flash "hard drive" full of jpgs? What is the command line parameter to tell LXpic where to look for the pictures? Cheers

by Luc

11/29/2005 @ 1:08am

Hey there. Just did this on an ancient 486/25 and just to say the autoexec.bat line should read lxpic.com *.gif /Y&& not .exe. Thanks loads for publishing this!

by Luc

1/1/2006 @ 10:51am

I have an ibm thinkpad 380 and im using lxpic with a win 98 boot on a flash card but my problem is that the thinkpad keeps shutting off after an hour. I cant figure out how to tell the system to stop going into hybernation. And in the bios i see power managment but theres no way to get inot it. It just shows you what version it uses and ibm has no clue how to fix it in dos. Is there a program that will tell this thing not to shut down????

by peter

2/20/2006 @ 8:08pm

would there be a way to make lxpic look for the pictures on a web server? i was thinking about making something where i could have 2 frames that would run off of the same pictures.

by stew

3/14/2006 @ 2:02pm

I think what you did is really cool!! I have an old toshiba satillite pro 425 cdt laptop and i was wondering if it would work if i tried to make a pic frame like urz?

by Q

4/25/2006 @ 12:45pm

Very cool.

Stew, I have two laptops that I turned into digital picture frames. One is at work, one is at home. They both sync remotely via rsync.

www.thewares.net/item/33

by DR WAre

6/16/2006 @ 1:05am

Hey, that' an interesting thing. I remember that my son also did a thing like that in our garage. Nice what I find these days.:)

by Braunhirse

9/15/2006 @ 11:56am

Nice project, but it would be so much sweeter with a stylish old Mac laptop, no? :-)

by kickstand

2/17/2007 @ 3:28am

Nice job. I've done a similar one with dos ans lxpic too

by Lionel

3/10/2007 @ 5:36am

this is not i want i want some thing my friends say
mods they say there is neo flying mod they say we can fly with this mod so plz give me this mod plzzzzz

by dan&jun

8/15/2007 @ 7:16pm

Nice work - its good to see a 386 being put to some good use instead of being junked into land fill garbage! I will hunt out my old 486 being tossing it out... Thanks.

by Harvey (DigiVista)

1/23/2008 @ 4:13pm

I am currently modding a thinkpad 770E into a DPF check it out at: http://homecncfun.blogspot.com/

by slm4996

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