Photoframe Pictures!

Filed Under: Art, General by samuelk — Leave a comment

Friday April 10, 2009

I finally took some pictures of the guts of my photo frame (click on any of the images to go to the flickr site where you can view larger versions):

This is the motherboard by itself, stripped of all peripherals. The small circuit board hanging off the top of the motherboard holds the power and drive activity LEDs. I’ll probably remove it unless I can find a cool way to let the LEDs show through the frame.

Here we have the LCD display, complete with my fingerprints.

This is the rear of the LCD display, with ribbon cable connections for powering the display and the flourescent backlight.

Here are the peripherals that will be connected to the motherboard in the completed frame: (bottom row, L to R) two laptop speakers, the 12GB hard drive and the wireless network card; (top row, L to R) the CMOS battery (this battery allows the system to keep the correct date, time and configuration if it’s unplugged or if the main battery runs out), and the touchpad. The flexible orange circuitboard under the touchpad contains connections for the speakers and CMOS battery.

These are the peripherals that I only need while building the system: mouse, keyboard and DVD drive. This won’t be in the final build of the photo frame.

This is the system all put together.

Powered on and booting. The flash really shows how much I need to clean this screen. The small orange and grey box hanging at the end of the network cable in the background is an emergency wired connection that I used when the wireless card wasn’t working; which was quite often until just a couple of days ago.

Fully booted. I’m working on setting the system up so that when it boots, it automatically launches streaming audio from the local NPR station. That part still isn’t working quite yet, but I can work on that after the frame is finished.