Make electronic widget frames from old computers

After transforming an old laptop into an MP3 player, I show you how to turn a very (very very) old laptop into a digital clock with multiple "skins"
MP3 Player
The end of the project shows you what you can do with a more recent laptop with a real graphic OS. I am curently working in improving the interface on this laptop.
This is a nice way to recycle old hardware you can found or buy for cheap.

Step 1 Find the laptop

For this project, I used a very old 286 (80MHz) with a monochrome screen. This is a Compaq LTE 286. The passive matrix screen can only display gray levels...
Remove the screen. I recommend you to keep the plastic enclosure and cut the edge so that you can glue the back and the laptop with the back of the screen without damaging the LCD.
So find a way to reverse the LCD by cutting the screen hinge.

Comments

[WinbookXL3]

Cool!, what program is that can i download it?

[setiorion007]

http://rapidshare.com/files/414670651/clock.rar.html use my files to boot the clock from cd

[setiorion007]

It works with a Bootable cd .. follow the steps to boot the clock through cd 1. Download win 98 boot cd from (Win98_bootdisk.iso) http://www.allbootdisks.com/download/iso.html 2. Download Ultraiso software (it is a trial version ) 3. Open Win98_bootdisk.iso with Ultraiso 4. In the ultraiso screen you will see all the win 98 boot files----(select all of them and delete them) 5. Dont leave the Ultraiso screen 6.Copy the files from my clock and paste them in the Ultraiso screen from where you deleted Win98 boot files previously 7. Press save in Ultraiso 8.Burn the cd 9.Insert the Cd in a new laptop and select CD as bootable devise and restart the laptop and boot from cd 10.when prompted select option 1. Start computer with cd-rom support 11.enter D:\ 12.enter D:\autoexec U will see the clock now Hope this works for everyone Dont forget tot use my files for the clock as i did some minor mods so it will work with CD

[stephenniall]

Now all you have to do is program that Easy button to change slides ! using a parallel port it shouldnt be too hard

[mattccc]

how old is that laptop

[emilsegna]

Can i boot the "program" from an cd? First download clock.zip then unpack it then move the folder to the cd? or what... i only have 1cd left and the laptop has no floppy

[rensjuuuh]

And is it also possible to connect an usb-floppy-disk-drive to an digital photo frame and then run the programm on it??

[rensjuuuh]

Is this program in English or in French??

[lopez8675]

Could you put the flash program up?

[ReCreate]

Can you Give us the Source .BAS files for all of this?

[tonypascal]

Done, you should be able to download them, right ?

[ReCreate]

Ah Yes,It Worked. Is It that you Have 2+MB of files Compressed on the Floppy On a cabinet and that you extract it to a ram disk? Very clever:)

[tonypascal]

yes, if I remember correctly, this why the trick I used... Pictures have a good compression rate. Did the sources helped ? keep me informed about you updates, for instance, if you translated them. There is a bug I know that I didn't correct. on the matrix clock, at midnight, the white square is not placed correctly... have fun

[ReCreate]

Well You used .bmp They have the worst compression,probably a 600KB BMP Would be like a 1KB PNG. But then again you can't Display Png Images Without Massive Blobs of code to decode the image.

[techwreck]

hey just wondering where did you find such plexi glass. I have been trying to find one like that for quite some time now. Btw awesome job. but please do let em know.

[robots199]

Can you PLEASE distribute the widget dashboard. It would be the best!

[justindra]

that is awesome..... i'm not sure if anyone has mentioned this to you.... but it would be really cool if you could control it using touch screen.... In that case, i suppose you would need to use a tablet pc or something of the same sort..... Once again, great job...

[catpsi]

i love this instructable and was able to create a floppy bootdisk from vmware fusion in os x with a file from bootdisk.com - but! the ping pong program keeps crashing the whole shebang... error message: "Illegal function call in module PINGPONG at address 07B7:0DC5" - you can recover by hitting any key to "return to system" but it kind of makes this useless. is there a way to get it to not load the pingpong module and just stay on the same one? i'll try to delete just that module and see if there's error checking or something that will keep it running without it...

[rotamagic]

great job.... is there anyway to change the settings besides BIOS?

[drotten]

Really nice and inspirational! Because the clock needed MS-DOS and I couldn't play with the source code i wrote a new clock application myself using C++, SDL and OpenGL.

Feel free to visit http://lifeasme.se to download the source code , perhaps it could be useful for someone.

[tonypascal]

thank you for your update, this is a very nice project that you prepared. I will have a closer look. Bye bye

[cotton]

sick give me the program i will run it under linux on a destop hooked to a tv or monitor it wont be as goot looking but i want it with net controls

[eric.muir]

PLEASE provide this flash app :) are you still working on it? just curious because this will make my project awesome!

[tonypascal]

The problem is that it is not working yet. I do not work on it anymore (for the moment). Another proble is that you cannot modify the access code (to facebook, gmail...) without going into the flash code... this is a problem I cannot solve easily. I will try to post the application one day, I just need to make it work first... bye

[eric.muir]

oh, I figured as much bc I played around with it and ran into several problems... Thanks for the help tho!

[geekzilla]

Great job, i was wondering that when you release the dashboard ui where it will be available

[Xellers]

For some reason, this isn't working for me. When I try to boot this on my old laptop, it claims that there was an error and that something is missing. Please help. TY

[claytontheaggie]

This is incredible! I love it! Will you distribute this flash application?

[motorman]

How complete is the code for the color apple widgets you have in the last step. I've had this same idea but have no idea where to even begin to code something like this. Also is there a way to have the widgets full screen? And could it be set up to display with voice command? Any help would be appreciated as i have already designed mine but am lacking on code and computer components. Would it be better to do this on a mac machine or a pc? Thanks.

[awkrin]

if the computer was better, u could of make it kind of touchscreen, with a webcam and touchlib, but that needs to run many programs at once, probably making the computer run extremly slow. anyways, I always thought that u can't run videos on old computers because of the viceo card. the first time I ever ran a video on an old computer(486) I was like 9 and didn't exactly know about codecs, compression, decimpression etc. so what u meant in step 4 is that u can really run 800x600 or whatever was the res of that on pentium 1s, right? and why is the autoexec.bat in french?

[tonypascal]

Yes, the video runs quick smoothly, but its an uncompressed video. It takes a lot of space but requires less running time. I recall that the first computer woth a black and white display is not the one on which the video runs. The autoexec is in franch because I'am french... and I used a french version of windows to generate the floppy disk, I suppose...

[gschoppe]

ummm .... how is the MONOCHROME screen from a 286 playing smooth COLOR video?

[tonypascal]

That's an other project and laptop, but the idea is exactly the same. I think that a picture/video frame is not very innovative, so my Instructable does not deal with it. By the way, the specs of the other laptop are not but better, except a color display

[ironsmiter]

"Not much better"? certainly not modern, but anything capable of playing video files at that framerate, with more than 16 colors.... makes a 286 look like a pocket calculator(except for the fitting in a pocket issue :-) I'm guessing a high end 486 or pentium, at least(100Mhz+ with a small wad of ram JUST for mp3 decoding) Sorry to nitpick, but when you begin spouting numbers like 286 that people haven't heard in over a decade, we all get a little nastolgic and excited :-)

[Yerboogieman]

im sorry but, you said a high end 486 and i cracked up laughing, im pretty sure you mean for this project but its still pretty funny, lol

[bmlbytes]

If you get excited by hearing 286, I have to know what you think when you hear the word Commodore. I have a Commodore 64 with a few missing keys, and a Commodore 16 that is almost new (I have the box and there are no scratches on it). Now I want to go write a BASIC program and play Atari 2600

[Yerboogieman]

i like to play Street rod and leisure suit larry

[ironsmiter]

Shame... you better send those Commodores to me, so i can fix them and put them in the collection! :-) Hehe, I'll do you one better I have a TRS-80 model 3, in the basement, just for taking "Oregon trail" breaks while doing stuff! I've been fortunate enough to be able to "retire" my 2600. it's fully functional, but has been replaced by a modded "atari flashback" so the oigional cartridges still get used... but the hardware is saved(it's older than some of my friends!)

[thinker]

all we have are
an AMSTRAD with colour monitor
a sega megadrive
and sega master system II
=p

[Yerboogieman]

i loved my 286 :-)