LCD digital picture frame, Version 2

I liked it so much I bought an identical thinkpad on ebay.

Pictures here

Properties

• No noise
• Cheap

The second pictureframe use a Compact Flash card to store pictures

About the laptops.

Hardware

• I removed the CD drives. I do not need them and one was broken anyway.
• I removed the batteries. The ThinkPad runs without a battery. The battery just makes the picture frame heavier and might use more electricity. Also I consider it an advantage that you can turn off the picture frame by just turning off the powder.
• On the first ThinkPad I left the keyboard in. By the second I found out that it can boot with the keyboard if the trackpoint is disabled in Windows Thinkpad menu.
• I removed the speaker, the volume control, and an audio module (the small PCB to rigth with the microphone)
• I removed the center panel with the LED's

The BIOS.

I tried to flash-upgrade the first thinkpad but the upgrade failed. At least I could still boot the laptop but all entries in the BIOS was gone. Only the stupid bird was left. I tried upgrading again but the upgrade program declared that I already had the newest version and exited.

Getting rid of suspend-mode, X blanking etc

1. I could have disabled suspending permanently from within the Win95 that came on the laptop. However formatting the disk was the first thing I did. On the second pictureframe i remembered to do this.
2. I could have booted the thinkpad with a DOS floppy and run a program, downloadable from www.ibm.com to modify the BIOS. But I did not realise this until I had build the picture frame, and I had not made a hole for the cable to the external floppy drive.
3. In the end I used the "tpctl" package. It is a kernel module and some programs. But the changes made with tpctl are not permanent. I run tpctp from /etc/rc2.d/S95nosuspend like this:

   
   #!/bin/bash
   tpctl --setup-display-internal=enable
   tpctl --pm-mode-AC=manual
   tpctl --pm-sedation-standby-timer=-
   tpctl --pm-sedation-suspend-or-hibernate-timer=-
   tpctl --pm-sedation-hibernate-from-suspend-timer=-
   tpctl --pm-sedation-hardware-or-software=-
   tpctl --pma=manual
   tpctl --pm-timer-mode-suspend-or-hibernate=disable
   tpctl --pm-timer-mode-blank-display=disable
   tpctl --pm-timer-mode-standby=disable
   tpctl --pm-mode-safe-suspend=disable
   
   

Get rid of cursor in X.

http://wearcam.org/seatsale/programs/blankcursor.bdf

For Xfree 4.x there are more possibilities.

Slideshow

Convert pictures to screen size with "convert" from "imagemagick". Eg

for img in foo*.jpg; do convert -depth 16 -resize 800x600 -quality 70 $img pf$img; done

This does what you want: Keep the aspect ratio and fit pictures to screen without rotating.

Pictureframe 1: Network

Because the picture frame has no accessible keyboard, floppy-drive, CD-drive, USB, or serial port, if it loses access to the network, there is no way to get to it without taking it apart. The picture frame can be moved and wireless network configurations can change.

I wrote a small script that will try to get on all wireless networks, that I know. cyclenet (of course keys and addresses are fake here).

Operating system

Pictureframe 2: CompactFlash card

Operating system

In total the Operating system takes up 30MBytes, leaving 34 MBytes for pictures.

Make sure to mount the root filesystem read-only or the CF disk will wear out. I mounted at tmpfs on /tmp to allow X to write there.

Software

Displaying pictures

I then had to use X to display the photos. Xfree 4.3 did not work. XFree 3.3.6 (XF86Config) from Debian stable worked right away, except that I spend quite a lot of time getting rid of the X-cursor in the middle of screen. I ended up using http://wearcam.org/seatsale/programs/blankcursor.bdf While doing a some research on the internet I realized I was not the only one struggling with this annoying problem. I really think there should be a "noCursor" option in XF86Config.

Changing pictures remotely

Other ideas

• Streaming from network. I.e. a gallery server.
• With the picture-frame running NTP it could be a good precise clock. osdclock works well. Run like: osd_clock -s0 -c blue