DIY Digital Picture Frame/Old

Online Reources

• Guide to using Damn Small Linux for this
• This project has the idea I"m looking for, keep it in "laptop" form as much as possible to make future enhancements easier.

Physical Resources

• Ratmandu is donating a Latitude C640 with no optical drive, keyboard, or RAM
  • Purchased 128MB of RAM from ebay for ~$8
  • Switched stick I purchased for an extra 256MB stick that Strages had
  • Salvaged a 20GB hard drive from the ancient Latitude that ran Win95 (relatively huge, considering the age)
  • Was able to PXE boot and install Ubuntu
  • According to This Document the Docking Station pin for Turning on the laptop is pin #17, and one of the Ground pins is pin #10. Should be able to put an external switch across these two to make the unit power up.
  • LCD Ribbon cable will not reach motherboard, will need to purchase an extension for it.
    • Alternatively, need to open up LCD housing and see how long the cable will reach. may be able to mount the LCD to the bottom of the computer (with spacers for airflow) as that would provide a usable cable orientation

• • • • Was unable to find an extension Cable
      • When the LCD housing was taken apart, it was found that the cable would reach if the LCD was mounted to the underside of the laptop
      • Unfortunately the LCD ribbon cable that powers the cold cathodes tore
        • Replacement cable would be $25 after shipping at parts-people.com

• I have an old Gateway machine that might be PXE bootable. Ratmandu is bringing a PCMCIA network card so I can try this out.
  • This machine worked out well. Was able to disassemble and reconnect screen and still have the machine function.

First picture shows screen still working. Second Picture shows the switch extended out. Third Picture shows some hot glue strain relief.

• • Next: Secure Screen to Laptop. Make sure keyboard will work with computer first.

Soft Resources

• Have installe Ubuntu via PXE boot
• Installed ubuntu-desktop
• Installed flickrfs
• created flickr account
  • flickerfs does not need a username/password combination to access flickr, it uses some kind of authentication key. It works, I don't need to understand it.
• installed feh at brimstone's recommendation, some sort of screen saver
  • command: feh -F -D 1 .
    • This commend starts a slideshow through the directory
    • brimstome recommended rsyncing the directory to somewhere as it appeared to be pulling the images from flickr each time rather than storing them locally?
    • flickerfs allows you to create a directory in the public tags directory to pull in photos of that tag. it uses the directory name as the tag
    • looks like flickerfs unmounts at reboot. may need to write a script to create the desired directory/tag at boot
    • flickrfs must be run at startup

#!/bin/sh

#need to put in a wait statement here to give time for network to boot before
#attempting to connect with flickr
cd /home/omegix
flickrfs jeff_flickr

#need to either put a wait statement here to give time for pictures to load,
#or rsync to a directory known to have some static files

mkdir /home/omegix/jeff_flickr/tags/public/lolcats
cd /home/omegix/jeff_flickr/tags/public/lolcats
feh -F -D 2 *.jpg