I was over at a friend of mines house and he had one of those new digital picture frames. It has a 3" X 5" lcd display on it and scrolls through pictures on a cd that you put in it. Well the wife saw it and said she had to have one so I asked how much. It was $400.00 for that little bastard. Well I said no way right off the bat, then she said,"how much did that little empeg thingy cost you?". She had me. So I thought if I was going to have a digital pictureframe I wanted a big one and they were around $1100 for one about the size of a laptop screen. Well if I was going to get one that size I might as well get a laptop, cut a hole in the wall, network it to my desktop and other laptop so I could access emplode from it. So that is what I did and I also got a cool little program that is a screensaver that goes through all your pictures on your hard drive, mine is an 80GB on my desktop that I store the pictures on. In the screensaver I specified the pictures folder on my desktop since the one on the laptop pictureframe is under 1GB. I got the old Compaq laptop off of Ebay for $110 and had a network card an WALLA! Check it out at http://www.riocar.org/modules.php?set_albumName=album64&op=modload&name=gallery&file=index&include=view_album.php click on the pictures twice for the big blowup size!

kick ass idea!! I see the laptop in the gallery, but no finished shots..i wanna see i wanna see!!!

[edit] i must have beat you to the gallery. There they are...

Dooood. That is excellent. Great job!!!

They are all in there now!

When you wrote "Well if I was going to get one that size I might as well get a laptop, cut a hole in the wall", I thought you were joking! It looks great, I'll have to steal that idea.

OMF Goodness!

I'm impressed. How does it look @ an angle? Did you put glass in the top frame (to make it look more like a picture?

Good lord, man...between this and your confidence in your docking stations, I believe you have officially become My Hero. Are your engineering skills self-taught or were they learned through schooling? I am not ashamed to admit that I Wanna Be Like Silamanajik. I've got quite a few engineer friends and none of them do anything like that.

BTW, your laptop-in-wall has rocketed to the top of my "Really cool things to build into my new house" list. Please, details!

Sweet!
Not only did you keep the wife happy, you impressed the geeks a hell of a lot more then if you just got the "picture frames" thingie.
Now if only it had a touch screen......

Thanks for the praise guys! As for the question "How does it look @ an angle? Did you put glass in the top frame (to make it look more like a picture?" It looks good from any angle and I made sure to put it at about shoulder height so there would not be any darkening problems. This is an old laptop, a 233mhz, so it does not have an active matrix screen like the new ones but it is still pretty clear. I did not put any glass over it because I did not want to induce any more glare than I had to. My engineering skills are the product of 4 years of college and good ol' common sense with gadgets. I played with lego's alot when I was a kid too. The best part is when someone is looking at the wall during the day and you cannot tell that there is a laptop in the wall, when the picture changes they almost fall over. It's hilarious!

If anybody needs more in depth info about this project feel free to ask and I will do as much as I can to help.

A laptop is not needed for this..

Viewsonic now has wireless LCD monitors...

Well, "wireless monitors" are realy just marketing... They're realizing that they've finally spent the millions to design "web tablets" just in time to find out that they aren't too usefull for much besides surfing the web, and maybe collecting signatures as you deliver packages.... So they've taken these same wince tablets, put a stand on them, and now call them monitors...

Used laptops are the cheapest way to get LCDs that I've found... I'm looking to add two dumb terminals to a network that really only need basic terminal emulation with a very small phyiscal footprint, and can't find anything that comes close to the price of a PII laptop.

Matthew

Sweet....I've been thinking of doing this for a while, although I'd really like to have a touchscreen interface. But there is no doubt that an old laptop is the cheapest solution.. Nicely done

I just saw the laptop in the wall picture and that is great! I would really like to see the persons face when the pic changes in front of their eyes. I love to see people make somthing great out of old stuff and to use their heads and think. Thats the kind of thinking that got us the empegs. Keep up the good ideas. Also thanks to all the people that made the empeg possible, and all the programs and updates etc., these things are great!

Ben
MK2 20gig
Hijacked

Very nice idea. I need to own a home so I can start doing things like this :-)

And thats a Compaq Armada 77xx laptop isn't it?

Yes, drakino, it is a compaq 7730 series. It's the perfect laptop for this application. You do not really need anything with supercomputing power. You could actually go with something even less as long as it had a cd drive and have the screensaver program pull the pics off the disc. Like I said, this 7730 is a 233mhz and it handles everything fine. I would like to see other peoples pictures of cool innovations using practical parts. "Empeg is the mother of invention"

Dude, you are my F'in hero! That ROCKS beyond all belief.

Now I know what to do with those old ThinkPad 600s that I have laying around.... Can you say 13.3" picture frame?

SCHWEET!

_owen

That thing is sweet man, nice job. I think it would be even cooler to have that think hooked up to some sort of speaker setup throughout your house, and the concealed keyboard could be your 'control center' so to sepak

In a way it is hooked up to my speaker system. I have my docking station, which you can see in my gallery also, hooked into my home theater system. When I run emplode on the digiframe (my new word for it) I can pick what songs to play. All I have to do is select the input on the receiver for the empeg and it is playing through my speakers. I also have my house and back deck wired for sound and can play the empeg music throughout.

I recently read about this Virtual Window Project, and it reminded me of the picture frame post. Pretty cool.

The link isn't working form me... php error or something. Is it in the RioCar.org photo gallery?

Yeah, it's in the gallery under Silamanajik's Jeep G.C. , Docking Station and Digital Pictureframe Emplode Interface . Try this one.

That's really really cool! Have you tried using Tony's empegface program? I think that'd be sweet. And it'd give you more control over the empeg than emplode by using just the touchpad. Even Mark's html interface would work using Hijack.

Is there any way to take the touch pad and mount it on the wall? Or get a usb type touch pad? I just imagine it being hard to type vertical like that, so having another input device would be cool.

Either way, that's a really nice project! It'd even be a cool night light too!

heh cool project, I wasn't brave enough to make a hole in my wall. Here's my effort