Old laptop as picture frame/TV/etc

Submitted by patrik on Fri, 2010-10-22 11:35

I've built a few of theese earlier, and it's a nice kind of project. In short we use an old laptop and strip it of unnecessary parts. The screen section is dismantled and placed the other way around, which makes the laptop look like a tablet PC. The keyboard and mousepad cant be used though.
The victim for conversion this time is a Fujistu Siemens Amilo M3438G. This is the heavier kind of laptop with 17" wide screen. This makes it nice as a bedroom TV for example. But my Amilo har a problem, it doesn't see the harddisk so it can't boot the normal way. The solution? Boot from USB. Which Linux flavour is left to decide.

Notes so far:

-It boots without a battery.
-It has a small IR remote that along other things can be used to turn the laptop on. Great!
-Most of the ports are on the sides which complicates the case building.

Some progress today. The keyboard was removed to save some space, no problems. The case was opened with the goal to get the lid undone. This was easy, some screws to remove and the lid came of. The biggest trouble was the cabling for the screen. It's connected to the mainboard under the combined graphic card/CPU cooler, which had to be removed. The cable then was rerouted in a way that let the lid be placed the other way around. Here was also two cables for the Wifi, it has antennas in the lid. These were also rerouted. The cooler was remounted, and the lid could now be placed with the screen up instead of down on the computers backside. Voíla, we've built a tablet computer :)

Removing the hinges:

The hinges are hard to remove, think I'll treat them with the Dremel later:

CPU/Graphics cooler removed to get to the screen connector:

A tablet PC made from a common laptop:

Last thursday a case was built out of 4 millimeter plywood and some splines (8x33 millimeters). The case became ok, the drawings were not complete and much was done by improvising. Pictures to come later. I also managed to get rid of the hinges. A polygrip plier was used to hold the part sticking out, and then it was twisted and pulled until it came out of the hole.