386 Digital Picture Frame

• 1 386 or 486 laptop
• 1 copy of LxPic image viewer and slideshow freeware for DOS
• 1 version of DOS (BootDisk.com)
• 1 floppy disk
• some photos in GIF format
• wood of your choice (e.g. mdf)
• screw driver(s)
• saw(s)

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.

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...

...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.

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...