Onno goes D-I-Y! Turning a laptop into a picture frame In the beginning there was a laptop, an Apple PowerBook G3. Then, Onno came along, ripped it apart, put some wood around the remains et voila a picture frame was born! So, how did this all happen? I bought the machine on eBay. It is a 4 year old laptop; there are quite a few on eBay actually and selling for quite reasonable prices. Here it is, just after it arrived and the screwdrivers are lying at the ready! Taking it apart took a couple of hours. Some care was required as it was really a goal that it all still work afterwards. Removing the plastic from around the screen was tricky. Here you see the key pieces of what makes a laptop work. From left to right: the PCMCIA wireless card with the little fan dangling below it, then the CPU itself and the DRAM chips, and on the right the hard drive. Above the hard drive is the power board. Already gone are the modem card, the little speakers, microphone and the keyboard. The black blob at the bottom hides the connection for the battery and CDROM management card. The keyboard normally connects into there too. I had hoped not to need that to save space but unfortunately the machine would not start without the card. And here is the pile of leftovers, the pieces of plastic, the battery, the CDROM and the trackpad. Next, it was off to Home Depot to have some wood sawed to meassure and get some tools (like a figure saw). I attached the motherboard, hard drve and so on to the bottom pice of wood (using small screws and tape), used the figure saw to cut out the area for the lcd screen and taped the screen to it. And here is the result. The picture frame connects to our wireless network, so the only cord it needs is the power cord you see in the photo, and it is now ready to be attached to the wall. From the iMac in the office we can log into the machine and copy any pictures we want to show. These are displayed by the machine by means of the screensaver. This was a lot of fun to do, and I already have a next project in mind: a jukebox containing all our CDs... There is a web site you may want to check out. People are showing there the various ways in which they built their own little PCs, or masqueraded their computers as everyday things, like a teddybear or a 30-ies radio. Click to go to the mini-itx web site.