I always thought it would be neat to custom machine an aluminum case for my old laptop. Especially since the plastic housing, hinges, and keyboard are falling apart. You could do it case-modder style with windows, or go for the macbook look of solid brushed aluminum. It would also be nice to see a modified cooling system to replace the noisy, aging fans.

i want to turn an laptop LCD into a LCD Shutter
for my motorcycle license plate..

if it “flashes” at “the right rate” when picked up by speed cameras it will only show a couple of the license plate identifiers. “or parts of”

but for the naked “slower than the speedcamera shutter” eye
it will appere perfectly normal

/Kyndal

aside from the obvious (or maybe not) use as a tivo box, it could be used for a million things. hack a coffee maker and a toaster to be turned on by alarm. use it to make a digital table by projecting the screen through an old overhead projector onto an acrylic table and mount a camera to watch for movement (idea from http://www.instructables.com/id/Interactive-Multitouch-Display/). make your own alarm system with ir leds that are interrupted if the door/window/whatever is opened while the alarm is activated. make it look nice again and use it as a prop in a movie so you aren’t breaking a decent laptop, because everyone wants to make a movie. mount it on your wall like people do with their pets after they have gone to the taxidermist.

Might I suggest tearing the screen open and creating a digital projector, but taking it a step further by adding voice control and full multimedia streamed from another computer on the network. Then taking video clips next time you visit the beach, or finding a dvd of some exotic place that you would like to visit and converting an entire wall into a “window” that looks into another world. Alternatively if your computer is too old for any video (highly doubt it but you never know) you could display pictures downloaded from flickr using a simple script based on a keyword of your choosing. The biggest problem I see with a setup like this is the camouflaging of the projector setup as no one except a major geek wants to have a huge light leaking ugly projector in their living room.

You could always do the obvious digital picture frame… Build a wood casing, set a picture slideshow on a certain directory, file sharing on the network, put it to sleep at night, Never have to touch the picture frame, do it all remotely, get real fancy and VNC into it. I think it would be awesome to maybe have it networked and setup a program to capture display your current iTunes track from say… the computer upstairs, which is connected to your stereo. Not even a Digital picture frame, just a digital billboard of sorts. You could go even further and have it flash by your latest RSS headlines! I want one in my living room!

Without getting too tricky, as has been suggested there are plenty of free and not free media centre options you could go for (specially since a lot of laptops seem to come with video-out built in). I’m also a fan of the kitchen PC concept, if you don’t already have one. You could possibly build it into a part of your kitchen and use it to show you the weather, news and such in the morning.

I took an old Sony laptop panel and made a ‘wooden’ TV for my summerhouse/bar that blended into the surroundings. I used a LCD/TV adapter board off eBay (about £30)

I’m working on turning an old laptop (Toshiba 9020CT) with broken screen into an Asterisk PBX – to:
* take my voicemails (and give me web access to them),
* forward my calls to whatever phone I’m near at the moment,
* provide a flexible telephone interface to my weather station (or whatever other hardware I hack together and connect via RS232),
* provide a home intercom,
* conference calling,
* etc.

It not much of a hack though – Trixbox does most of this for me…

You’ve reminded me to submit a project I’ve been working on for a while. I had an old Libretto laptop and modified it to fit into the case of a ZX Spectrum. I don’t know how familiar it will be to people in the US but the Spectrum was an iconic computer in the UK in the 1980s. Details at http://srimech.com/?page_id=18

The obvious use, for me, was for running servers. Laptops get better uptime than desktops in my house because when I blow a fuse, the battery (even most old batteries) give me enough time to make it to the fuse box. And with a cheap surge protector in between the laptop and the wall I don’t have to worry about an expensive UPS.

Going for the cool factor, though. I have a habit of buying more ThinkPads then I need off Craigslist (ok, it’s bordering on addiction…) I’m thinking of getting a GPS unit for one and mounting it upside down on the roof of my car. I’d have a crazy retro-futuristic-post-apacolyptic flip-down nagivation system like you’d expect to see on a the Millennium Falcon or something. I could also hook it into the radio for mp3s on the go. Or use it as a DVD player or game console (MAME in a ’93 Civic!). What else do people use computers for in cars?

Tablet for drawing and handwriting:

Use the touchpad in absolut coordinate mode to input drawing and handwriting. Program a (graphic) software interface which let’s you control the padresolution-to-screenresolution ratio(sensitivity) and provides a drawing and writing area for which you can choose between storing the input as an image file or using a textinterpreter to export the input data to any texteditor.

The tricky part is designing the input device, the pen if thats what you wan’t to call it. Due to the capacitive nature of the touchpad which works with the electrical resistance of your fingertip, you will either need to make a pen tip with similar electrical features or the tip has to be made of a highly conductive material and be wired to the position of your fingertip while holding it. Then you have to make sure that the surface of the tip is small enough to use for handwriting but still large enough to create a sufficiant surface for the touchpad to recognize it.

You will be surprised by the resolution the touchpad has to offer.

The whole idea behind this is to use old laptops like digital paper. I.e. writing in steno or using your own handwriting shortcuts and symbols as well as adding scetches of i.e. circuit diagramms to document a lecture but not having to make the conversion from paper to computer all the time. Sure you can draw and write with your mouse, but it’s much less efficiant and natural then with a pen. Keyboard works fine too, but I find my self often getting more hung up in formating and designing the document rather then filling it up with information.

Most of the things you need to know you will find on the synaptics.com website.

I really want to make a box dedicated to playing mp3s. I’ve considered getting an old laptop, putting a little lcd display like from an old phone on the outside of the screen showing track title and such (should be an easy mod – space permitting – I’ve seen some tools made precisely for putting winamp meta on phone lcd’s via a parallel port) and moving the inevitable media buttons from the keyboard part to the outside of the screen so that you can use them with the box closed.

For the record I am fully aware that this whole project is obsoleted by nearly every mp3 player ever.

Build yourself a small scale arcade cabinet with controllers then detatch the screen and mount it in the cabinet. The rest of the laptop could be put behind a door for easy access where the coin mech would be in a normal cabinet.
Instal Mame and you have yourself a mini arcade game!

I use an old Acer laptop to run media center on a Touch Screen LCD I have mounted on the wall, I simply use this to scroll through music that operates on a wireless setup around my house.

It’s a bit “Star Trek” but hey, that’s what this technology is designed for ;)

Install Linux and some sniffer tools. set it up to hide on a network and sniff all traffic, add a wifi card to sniff and crack all the WEP passwords it can. Leave it hidden in an air vent connected to the company network for a few months running your EVIL.

retrieve it 5 months later, OWNZ the company.

Better yet, plant LOTS of them as your relay’s / zombies around town. connect through them to do your hacking so when the cops nail the location they only get a POS crap laptop that is full of insults.

Non cracker/hacker uses….

Laptops are nothing special, they are general purpose computing platforms with low horsepower. use one as a picture frame, router, digital signage, firewall, etherape console, Xterm, webpad, ALDL/ODBII scanner, Car tuning PC, garage laptop (best for old discarded toughbooks), webcam server in remote locations, install Zoneminder an a couple of cheap usb webcams and make a security PVR better than anything you can buy (P-III 500 or higher for this)

non technical uses…

Trebuchet projectiles, deadly frizbies, halloween costume, paint them green for Xmas decorations.

etc…

you can always do what i did with mine [a 300mhz toshiba portege 7010ct]

harden it and use it as a security evaluation tool. it super light, fast enough to do any network task, and you can give a report on bluetooth, wifi, ethernet, etc.

Although some of the niftier ideas are suggested above, I see a couple not represented. One is to find any old laptop new enough to run windows xp (450-500MHz, 192MB+ ram, and a network card and use them for traveling web surfing or typing. That way you don’t risk your nice laptop on no firewall setups or water damage. Another option which has been hinted at, but I see no direct reference too, is to add a touchscreen overlay and use it as a portabnle touchscreen for ahome automation system, or even security wall device or touchpad.

I’m still trying to find a way to salvage parts out of an old blown laptop to make a digital picture frame. Basically everything still works, with the exception of the motherboard. The price it would be to buy an ITX motherboard with LVDS to cram into a picture frame along with the LCD is pretty close to the same price as just buying a comparable digital picture frame. Suggestions? Help? Parts are off an old Dell D600 if it helps any.

Though a lot of people mention using the laptop screen as a second screen for whatever purpose, or making a wall-mounted screen out of it, I’d like to see how you’d connect it. I might sound completely stupid now, but perhaps if someone could figure how to connect it to a DVI port, that would really be nice since most modern computers have a DVI port these days.

I have an old Toshiba, Pentium 120 MHz, something like 24 MB of RAM and 4GB harddisk. It has a working CD player, but it’s a useless brick right now. I have a MP3 CD-player that cost me under EUR 100 years ago, now they even come cheaper. So if it would even be able to play MP3 CD’s that’s not really interesting except for the fact that you can display more information on the laptop display. I build a Gentoo Linux install for the laptop, but everything is too slow to be useful. Perhaps some CLI applications that require a lot of human interaction won’t ‘feel’ slow, but there’s no way you’d really want to use it with X, fluxbox and Firefox (way too slow).

Then again, a lot of people were talking about setups where you don’t really have much interaction, as in displaying pictures. That’s one of the few things old laptops might be able to do quite well, but having it as a monitor on a video card with some real power (and not an 1M card as in a lot of old laptops) would really be nicer.

Using the screen and the laptop keyboard and touchpad (or perhaps a tablet layer) it would make for a nice addition to any MythTV box. I hate having to turn on my TV, changing the TV to the right channel and stuff like that just to schedule a recording. But of course you can just as well use MythWeb and schedule it from a browser on a standalone machine.

Also, when you’re not gonna use a laptop as laptop anymore, take of it’s casing. Take out the floppy drive, CD drive and perhaps if possible the harddisk. Take out the battery. Laptop parts are small, really small. It might be possible to shrink the motherboard size a bit too, because you probably won’t be using all of the connections. This way you can get something as small as a Mac Mini, or perhaps even as small as a wireless router, or a normal router for that matter. This is only useful if it doesn’t cost too much though, I bought my Mac Mini with 1.5 GHz Intel Core Solo for EUR 350, new and at a certified Apple reseller.

I think what I’d like to see most is either one of the following three:
- Laptop with most parts removed, rehoused so that it’s smaller, providing some kind of web access. Tablet would be nice, so you can easily navigate. Have it display current playing songs, upcoming myth recordings, program guide and RSS feeds. If there’s a keyboard attached (or it runs synergy and you always have another machine with keyboard and mouse connected which you can use) also allow it for easy access to machines/servers you need to maintain. It’s always a pain that when you’re playing a game someone needs you to change something on a server and you need to quit your game or even reboot… Also messaging could be nice, takes the clutter from your desktop. All in all this way it’ll end up as a home Internet/Media PC and needs quite some horsepower, more than my Pentium 120 MHz anyways…

- An other option I like is having the display attached to another device, in a cheap and reliable way. DVI->LVVDS or something would be really nice, also TV->LVDS is nice, because most devices can do TV output.

- The third option that would be nice is to take only the stuff you can really use from the laptop and put it in a small box, as a silent server, serving whatever you need/it’s capable of. It can serve as Calendar server, perhaps small web server or maybe Network Attached Storage (assuming it isn’t old and slow, with no USB 2 and a slow old harddisk). You can run a Daap server on it to stream music to iTunes and other Daap-capable clients and have it log from remote servers.

Because I bored you all to death I’m gonna stop right now… Hope someone likes all I wrote :)

Hmmm. Originally I was going to suggest the TabletPC doorbell idea. But now that that’s beet done, ooooh. What to suggest!?

I’ve always been a fan of the terminals on the later Star Trek series’ – the Information Points as mentioned in a previous post, are essentially the same thing. However, it’s easy enough to get old Pentium 2/3 systems in bulk buy from business resellers these days, and if you’re lucky, it’s possible to get Tablet’s too. Even if the TabletPC’s are a no go, it’s feasible to remove chunks of Laptops, such as the inner casing, keyboard and trackpad and screen hinge – and mount the display above the motherboard.

With a touch panel, or the addition of an old desktop Wacom (see the DIY Cintiq projects all over the intarwebz) will give you a slate tablet useful for many things. With the appropriate application of GNU/Linux, you can even get a comfortable KDE display on these machines – although you will then lose streaming video capability. With a “light” WM, such as XFCE or my personal favourite tiny-DE, blackbox – you have a fully capable web information point. Here’s the easy, but cool bit.

These boxes are perfectly good terminals (especially with a battery in) for recessing into fixtures and even walls! If you live somewhere free from Chavs, Raj’s or well, any general acronym-enabled unpleasant people. You can mount one in a custom built pedestal outside your door. With a little more hacking, you could use a simpler screenless laptop mod to control an electronic door bolt based on the input to this external enclosure. (Of course, this works best if the e-bolt has a manual override, such as a key – and using the WACOM based hacks, since they can be fully waterproofed.)

So you have your neat front door tablet, working as an electronic lock, and with a webcam, speaker and microphone – as a full intercom too. Then you could mount another one, say on a tv mount type boom next to your bed. Useful for accessing the intercom, or checking email, or watching Naruto cartoons on YouTube. Same goes (Without the webcam) for the bathroom, for the kitchen, you could hook up another screenless one to your HD capable TV in the living room, Have a spare running a server (or even being part of a server farm) in the attic, basement, or appropriate closet.

The possibilities are wide. Although here’s another one, for that “$30,000 kitchen” feel.

Take your laptop, and remove most of the components. Attach the hinge to a piece of Aluminium angle, and the keyboard (And perhaps a wacom tablet) into your choice of furnishing material. I personally like glass furniture – tough glass is very durable, and easy to clean. Follow the Multitouch display idea again, and have a virtual keyboard and mouse, too!

I use old laptops for a variety of reasons. I have one running a satellite emulation 24/7. Another (combined with a TV-capture pc-card) is my portable television/pvr. I also have a really really old armada 4131t being used as a permanant dummy terminal for a wrt54gs router.

any old laptop with a parallel port and some relays can give you control of just about any electronic device. write a simple program that handles remote access or timers, and you got yourself a cheap automated home deely.

a few years ago, back in first year, i disassembled an old XT laptop and hung parts of it on the wall of my residence room and had it running a neat screensaver.

i had heard a rumor that a friend of a friend had somehow done something similar many years before with 4 old laptop monitors running simultaneously with 4 different screen savers off one XT.

I reused an old 486 laptop to bridge my basement network to my wireless network upstairs. It’s been running for 2 years and works pretty well.

http://vapid.dhs.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=vapidlabs:laptop_wireless_bridge

I’m too lazy to see if anyone has already posted this.
If it’s fast enough and has two built in usb ports, get an eye toy (or the web cam of choice), an irobot create (that cheap roomba that is just a moving platform), a serial cable to connect the laptop to the roomba, and a power source for the laptop. Use them to make a moving webcam.

I think an old semi functional laptop could be revived into a Cintique type drawing tablet with the addition of a touchscreen film to the laptop LCD. There would be a little bit of programming to get it to work properly but it sounds possible to me.

You can remove the lcd from the body, turn it around and put it onto the back, then load some free slideshow software onto it, add a stand and voila! Digital picture frame! for extra fun, hook up the slideshow to a flickr account, so grandma can see pictures of the kids right after you upload them to your account!

Old laptops are great as :
- under-the-sofa home server/ap
- VT100 compatible terminal (some frenchie made a floppy named Termux, linux+minicom, I used it some years)
- Car-embeeded PC
- reuse the power supply ! (did this when my Ascienta AST910n died)
- House automation system, old lappys often have a // port, useful for something like a relay board, and serial ports for devices like a rfid reader, temp sensor :)
- Laptop ! who needs tons o’ gigahertz and petabytes of ram ? A PII with 128 Mb RAM is sufficient for quite a lot of things (kids computer ?), and a PIII / 256 Mb RAM can do nearly every task (except gaming, but honestly, who cares)

I’ve already tried turning an old laptop into a internet-controlled, webcam-equipped robot (or rover, maybe – it’s not autonomous). Motor control is through an L298 driven by the parallel port, on tank-style chassis from a R/C robot. Unfortunately, the laptop is a little too old and slow to run any videoconferencing software I’ve tried comfortably along with a VNC session for control, and the webcam’s narrow field of vision makes getting through doorways an ordeal.

I don’t think I’ll be pursuing the project much more, although I’d like to eventually put a microcontroller in the chassis and do something else with it. Still, it has worked to some extent and it’s been an interesting experience. And I’ll take suggestions for lightweight Linux videoconferencing/video streaming software if anyone has any.

I use a old 486 laptop with broken keyboard in my lab. I have wifi access to my lan, a sealed keayboard with incorporate mouse (from symcod) end I use it to stream mp3 to the lab, and , in future, to drive my cnc :-)
Some other ideas for you :

-use 5 laptor , build a cubic box and incorporate on it the 5 display, you can have a cubic super display :-)

-Use a laptop in your car to take a look at the ODB2 values (Fast and Furious school)

-Use it like a monitor for the security camera that you have in the garden, plus a ltp to realis board to trigger some lights or an alarm

- Use like a remote interfacing with an old nokia phone (I’ve used years ago a 5110) in combination with a ltp relais board to swith on/off some lights and to power on the boiler for my shower…

-use it like a super mega remote for your tv,dvd player,vrc, laserdisk and so on with a simple interface to learn all the remote. You can have a real BIG remote to control every IR items in your house :-)

This may be a bit ambitious, but I’ve always been very interested in the idea of kitchen automation.

Hack the laptop into an all in the screen type thing, ala what some people will do with older mac laptops (I’ve lost the link but the screen ends up being mounted in a thick plexi frame), hook it in to whatever you’ve got around (let it control a toaster, monitor fridge temperature, oven temp, even control the oven if you don’t have an ancient gas one you wouldn’t trust for anything like I do) then stick it on WiFi and give it Bluetooth so you can control/monitor across the network or from portable devices with bluetooth.

With the basic framework set up you could hook it into all kinds of things, the automation wouldn’t need to end in the kitchen. But it would probably be quite a bit of work.

While working in a tiny little windowless closet/office, I actually designed an LCD “window” that used screens arranged together complete with molding, blinds, a ledge, etc. that connected to a wireless camera placed outside, giving me a window in my otherwise windowless office.

Then, I realized: why stop there?

Why have a window to your world, when you could have a window to anywhere? Imagine if you had an LCD window that looked out over the New York skyline? Or maybe Tokyo? The Grand Canyon?

Imagine looking out over a beautiful Parisian sunrise while you sip your morning coffee…

You could either have 24 hours of footage loaded into a hard drive discreetly hidden in the windowsill, or if the project really took off, maybe even connect wirelessly to a live streaming camera.

It would be timed to correspond with the system clock so that what you saw always matched up with the current time.

Other options could include:

a)Weather mode – you would have several instances of weather conditions loaded on the computer (light rain, heavy rain, overcast, snowy, windy, stormy, etc) and depending on your local weather (pulled wirelessly from the internet) the screen would blend into that mode. If it was raining outside, it would be raining onscreen.

b)Sound mode – designed to further the illusion of actually being in another part of the world, you could also have authentic sounds of your chosen location played lightly over a set of speakers (also embedded into the windowsill), so that the sounds of New York traffic, or the wind whistling through the Grand Canyon could be quietly overheard.

This would be perfect for home offices, cubicles, kitchens, small apartments, and generally anywhere that you want to escape.

Turn it into an automatic wardriving machine, with auto wep and or wpa cracking, with no or minimal user input. And maybe an auto e-mail notification once a wifi location has been hacked.

Create a Pong clock!!!
Just download the pong clock screensaver and hang it on the wall. There is simply no coolest clock around.

a duck!

I…i mean…robotics!

Even a low power laptop could probably handle enough to make for either an autonomous robot _or_ an able co-pilot to monitor sensors and systems on board an ROV of some kind.

Webcams, wifi connections and other stuff being more common means some cool potential!

I have a pair of laptop monitors which work, but the motherboards are toasted. A digital picture viewer which _doesn’t_ use the laptop to drive the images would be neat.

I’ve got an old laptop dismantled as the pretty banal digital photo frame. It boots windows 95 (!) and reads photo cds… Pretty unremarkable.

However,

a table top MAME arcade machine, complete with arcade style joysticks, but with a form factor small enough to fit on a dinner table…. Now that could be something.

I’ve always enjoyed the hype around RFID. How about creating an RFID transmitter that would transmit several different frequencies depending on the command given. These different frequencies could trigger events such as locking doors, turning on lights, etc.

This is possibly a better project for a PDA given the size/portability constraints. However lacking usefulness, I think it would be interesting.

I used my old Compaq as a secondary slide-out (using a keyboard tray) computer with an adjustable lcd screen mount to position it above my current laptop. Since the original screen died I had no qualms with striping it off and making a nice thin system, and then clocked the cpu down to keep noise/heat low. Using Synergy I used the old laptop as a sort of low load web browser and media player so I could work on my main system without gunking it up with small processes.

Thanks to easy adjustments to KDE’s theme and colors I was able to mimic OS X well enough to match the main system too so that it really felt like a second display more than a second computer. It also came in handy for times when I didn’t want to unpack my laptop just to check my email.

sorry if someone already said this, I don’t have time to read all 65 prior entries:

Tape two laptop screens to the front and back of a business suit. Then connect two webcams to each side, and feed the input to the screen on the opposite side: the result, a see-thru outfit. You’d have to hide the batteries (carefully) in your pants or make flat battery packs lining the inside of your jacket.

There are at least 3 ways of making an LCD screen from a laptop into a
monitor.

1, easy: loading specialized software to let you have a
virtual-monitor-over-ethernet.
2, hard: hacking the LCD driver chip to accept a DVI signal.
3, harder: Same as 2, but VGA.

absolutely low-tech use for broken displays: replacing the lcd panel with a tranparency of your choice gives a nice backlit sign.

You could make it into a homemade projector that was featured on engadget some while back. Something along this:

http://www.engadget.com/2006/10/17/how-to-build-your-own-hd-projector-part-1/

lots of great ideas, I would like to expand on a few.

for the office “window” you could hook up some webcams or the like to strategic locations around the office, so that you know when the boss is comming, or that annoying guy so that you can hide under your desk/ stop playing games. you could even hook up a motion sensor outside your office so if someone walks in while your away it switches the pic to something else. Or if your still living with your parents you could use it in your room for pretty much the same thing.

I also like the case-mod idea, if you hid it well enough you could make it look like your compy is completely cable free, or maybe so it looks like an empty case. or just have it running a continuous loop of pong/space invaders/ even lemmings. Or if your good with video editing , make it look like some rodent is running in one of those wheels and turning your cpu fan, or hook some temp sensors to it and if your cpu/vid-card gets hot enough they just burst into flames. You could even use the speed line to sync the video with the fan. If your computer happens to be water cooled, take some video of an aquarium and overlay it into your case, so that it looks like you’re truly water cooled.

I don’t know exactly how lcds work so forgive me for any stupidity but I’ve always wondered if it was possible to decrease the ammount of power used by replacing the backlighting (i’m assuming thats what it is) with a mirror to use the ambient reflected light to illuminate the screen, would be nice for the still picture frame thing so it uses less power if its on batteries.

one last idea, if you have a wall safe you could make it more high tech by using the lcd as the picture thats in front of it and even add touchscreen to make an interface to open the picture part of the safe. or throw in some palm reader stuff and get a picture that reads your palm and opens.

hope to hear more good ideas.

Old laptop can be used to test Your hacking skills. Let somebody to change BIOS passwords without telling You. Then try to unlock it.
I have one such laptop (100% legal, with all papers), but with corrupted CMOS-RAM data makes me to reverse engineer the BIOS or most likely to throw it into junk-box to wait better times.

I have an old Toshiba that I turned into a picture frame holder.. Using Windows 95 i have all my pictures and some of the videos i recorded to loop and all my friends love it.. Or, I am in the stages of using the laptop to put on my FIRST robotics robot.. TO make a fully atomous functioning robot…

Check it out at http://www.myspace.com/teamtimrobotics

Permanently mount it in your car or van as a war driving and entertainment center. Upload music, and movies and older games or emulators. It would be great to play some X-wing or Sonic the HedgeHog while on a long trip.

could be used as reactive targets….. Especially the old compaqs with their loose hinges. Just throw a piece of, well any metal really, and fire away!

#64: …I’m going to make a briefcase using that exact principle.
Showing up for an interview for an internship with that? Awesome.

i have a screen from an old hp jornada sub-notebook that i’ve been hanging onto for a project idea.
i want to connect it directly to a pin hole camera on the end of a flexible shaft. the plan is to use it to inspect the inside of my parrot nesting boxes to check for eggs or hatchlings to reduce the stress on the adult birds who could destroy eggs or hatchlings when they feel treatened.