Friday, January 23, 2009

What happened in the coffee room today

I walked in to get some water, and there was a puddle of coffee on the counter, dripping down onto the floor.

Somebody had filled the water and filter, but did not put the empty pot on, instead, they left the half full pot on...

'Cleanup in aisle twelve!'

Thursday, January 15, 2009

OH BOY!!! It's working!!!

I've got my Digital Picture frame working at last!!!

So, I used DSL (Linux), a Dell 233 CP laptop, and feh.

I used mostly the scripts and instructions from this guy:
http://www.thewares.net/item/33

I did not use the built in sound card, but added a USB sound card.

I added an external momentary button to trigger the on/off functionality.

I added an external DPST switch to turn the 'built in' speakers on and off. They are the speakers that were in the laptop, and with a few small holes in the back, they come through loud and clear.

I took the guts out of some unpowered PC speakers that allowed for an external 1/8" jack if I want. I put that on the side, but if I did it again, I'd make my own PCB board and mount the jack on the back.

I mounted the dongle from the network card so that it is accessed from the back. I may revisit WiFi at some point.

I put a DC power jack on the back, and cut the power supply cable, wiring it to have the nice jack on the back, and it's factory jack into the laptop guts.

I mounted a USB and media card reader out the right side.

I'll post pics soon.

The scripts are run via cron to go out and sync both music and picture files. At boot up, it starts xmms and feh running through the sound and pics that are stored locally. I also cronned 2 shut-down times, lunch time and 11 PM.

Cons:
There is no nice way to shut down the unit. If I push the power button, it does a hard shutdown, and the next start does a fsck to check the drive. Then you have to reboot again.

During boot up (almost a minute) you get to see all the bios and boot up junk.


That's all for now... I was pretty thrilled.

Monday, January 12, 2009