What do you get when you cross a new laptop, bought at a ridculous price, bad USB ports or controller (Not sure which), bent PCMCIA pins on the only slot, a dead built-in touch pad, boredom, alcohol, a screwdriver, and an idea? A mess with a slight hope. My Laptop got dissected because of boredom and I haven't used the thing in like 3 months. It's going to turn into a project, and I would like input to see which one everyone thinks is the most "do-able". Project Idea 1 - Digital Picture Frame - Feasibility 7/10 I can't seem to find the thread in the "Project Logs" section, but someone was turning an old PentII Compaq laptop into a digital picture frame. I thought that was a great idea, and might turn my HP ze1230 into one. Upside: Easiest of the project to accomplish, GF would love it, great piece to display my computer graphic work Downside: Waste of a powerful laptop (Athlon Mobile 1.4Ghz, 512Mb of Mem, 20Gb HD) Project Idea 2 - Digital Picture Frame & Router/File Server - Feasibility 5/10 Basically the same idea as project 1, except add the capability to act as a router. Would involve more money, since I would have to purchase an 8 port switch and a PCMCIA Lan Card, more wiring involved, but I think the wiring would add to the techie feel of it. [B}Upside:[/B] Better use of the hardware, more technilogically challenging, all the benefits of Project 1, plus the added bonus of a router. Downside: More money involved in creating, still not a 100% useful form of the laptop, more soldiering (I have pathetic soldiering skills IMO), requires more space for creation, something I am limited on in my apartment. Project Idea 3 - Transparent Water Cooled Laptop - Feasibility 2/10 The idea is to basically take the current laptop casing and duplicate it's basic layout with perspex, acrylic, etc. but expand the case slightly, making it wider, ie a 15" Screen Laptop into the body size of a 17" Screen one. Using the extra space, install a very simple watercooling and remove the "sub-par" heatsinks and fans that are currently installed. For anyone that owns or uses a laptop, those things get hot, especially on the bottom where it is resting on you. Water cooling would hopefully help this. Upside: First of, uber-geekness. Just the look I would get on people's faces when I pull that out of my bag would be worth it. A great challenge to take on, and I think it would be a great project for "community learning". Original concept as far as I know. Downside: Most expensive, time consuming and space consuming of the three projects. Not even sure if it would be possible. Any thoughts, philosophies, critiques, or ideas will be appreciated.
Im kind of interested in the first one. I have a touchscreen LCD out of a panasonic toughbook and I would love to make a digital picture frame. The third one seems to be the coolest, but like you said, expensive and time and space consuming. Good luck either way!
3... it's not to my knowledge been done before, and real mods to laptops are so rare. A digital picture frame has the downside of being a bit of a gimmick, and needing power wires etc. going up the wall to it. Watercooling would be interesting, it would have to be very simple and small - the pump and reservoir (is this neccesary? I don't really know about W/c) are going to be hard to fit in, perhaps another option if the size of these proves insurmountable would be to have waterpipe connectors, so that it was watercooled by a seperate pack. Not really the point of a laptop clearly, but it's an alternative and would probably prove cheaper. keep us posted =)
I would go for number 3! I've actually to do something very similiar to this, "have", by taking out the battery and trying to fit a small pump, res, and mini radiator but failed since I didn't have enough space. I didn't have the tools to make myself a brand new laptop case so I gave up. Oh well... Anyway, go for number three since you have much more needed access to resources than me. I would be happy to offer what little advice I have to help you succeed. Good luck.
You could turn the thing in a sort of DVD player/MP3 player/Tablet PC sort of thingy. Think: like an iPod, but way bigger with a nice big colour LCD screen. Slap in wireless networking to hook it to your home sound/theatre system (it then is a super-duper multi-remote control, with an option to act as standalone DVD player you can take anwhere --unfortunately you can't -yet- stream DVD over wireless).
I'd like to make a picture frame PC, I might be able to convince my parents to let me so they can have a big picture frame to put digital camera photos in http://mini-itx.com/projects/pictureframepc/ http://pictureframepc.niechift.com/main.html http://www.7thportal.org/?topic=pictureframepc http://www.applefritter.com/hacks/duodigitalframe/index.html edit: nexxo - he could just convert it and stream it, winamp nsv maybe
Are there not some commercially avaliable laptops about with water cooling? Sure I read that somewhere - I think it was yellow... You could steal ideas off them. It'd be funky to see a modded laptop... Thinking about it, got a few MMX laptops lying around somewhere which would make great pictures frames - thanks for the idea, I may owe you a drinkie!
