You might remember a long time ago I started to make a digital picture frame out of an old laptop I had. It was basicially finished except for the external stand or hanging hardware. However since I’ve worked on it we’ve moved twice and the hardware is still sitting in a box in the closet.
Lately I’ve been thinking about it again, and pressing it into service in another way: as a digital “info-board” for the ground floor of our house, where we often find ourselves wondering:
- What’s the weather forecast?
- What’s the phone number for (friend/relative/business)?
- Anything else that might be useful
Assuming that my hardware hasn’t died after being in storage for so long, the same system should be up for the task. The one major thing that’s changed is that I’m no longer using a crappy RangeLAN2 network, but I’ve graduated to full 802.11b. Also I’d have to figure out how to display the above information. I was using an SVGAlib-based image viewer before, since the hardware only has 16MB of RAM to speak of. There is a half-decent web browser called links that will use SVGAlib. I could whip up a portal that would show basic information on the screen using links…
