Little, no name, 1.5 inch LCD photo key-chains are all over the place for practically nothing. Not too surprisingly these things do not vary much in the parts that they use, some flash ram, a little lipo battery and a 16 bit color LCD. Wanting to find a way to reuse that LCD [Simon] Has an excellent tutorial on how to reuse a FTM144D01N LCD with a ILITEK ILI9163 LCD driver for your electronic projects.

Two units were used, one was ripped apart and soldered to a home made breakout board, the other was kept intact so its logic could be sniffed out with an oscilloscope. A pin-out was quickly determined since these things typically use a 8 or 16 bit data bus. Then a driver library was put together for AVR micro controllers, which includes some basic shape drawing and a 5×8 font.

While you may not be lucky enough to get this exact LCD screen from your local bargain store, there are a lot of pointers in here to hopefully get you up and going. We will be trying our luck on a very similar screen this afternoon as these things do have a decent picture and fairly quick response times already packaged in a hand-held case.

Join us after the break for a quick video.

A few months ago [Jason] got his hands on a free Coby DP700WD digital picture frame and thought it would be fun to hack. After realizing that the frame did not run any sort of Linux-based OS he figured his options were pretty limited, but he gave it a shot anyways.

The frame came with a set of built in images, and his goal was to swap them out for pictures of his own. He started by trying to read data from the frame’s serial flash chip, but found that the processor was preventing him from doing so. He de-soldered the chip from the frame, mounted it on a makeshift breakout board, and started reading up on SPI.

He was eventually able to read the device’s flash chip and swapped out the built-in images with his own. After a bit of trial and error, he was able to replace the frame’s boot screen with his own custom image as well.

If you are looking to do something similar, be sure to swing by his site – all of the tools and code he used to hack his frame are available for the taking.

Continue reading to see his modified picture frame in action.

Salvage usable parts
Not the flashiest choice, but potentially the most useful one. Just because the processor and RAM no longer meet your needs doesn’t mean that the hard drive, optical drive, and even the LCD screen should be thrown out too. All of these parts can be easily removed, and, with the exception of the screen in some cases, do not require total dismantling. When removing any of these parts, be careful to remove all mounting screws and carefully detach any cables before removing it from the case. LCD monitors almost always have a cable that attaches directly to the mainboard, and tearing it could render the monitor useless. If you wreck it, you’ll have to buy a new monitor to extend your desktop display.

Of course, you can also get a wealth of small parts from an old laptop, including screws, jumpers, heatsinks, cables, LEDs, and even keys from the keyboard. FRC Tech offers a good instructional page on the basics of dismantling a laptop, and a forum on ThinkComputers.com offers a comprehensive set of guides to taking apart many different Toshiba laptops.


Make a digital picture frame
A digital picture frame can be a great gift that you made yourself. Your mom would probably like it more than the ceramic pencil holder you made in the third grade. Unlike that time, though, you’ll have to decide whether the frame will show only preloaded images or whether it will access an online source like Flickr. PopSci.com offers this useful guide to building your own photo frame, as does Repair4Laptop.org.


Install Linux and make a media extender
Old laptops aren’t great at running memory or processor-intensive software, but they can make great Linux terminals. You could outfit it with Linux for exclusive internet use, data storage, or even for controlling other devices like a home entertainment center. Unfortunately you may also have to retrofit it with a larger harddrive or WiFi card to get better use out of it. Yesterday we mentioned both MythTV and XBMC as alternative frontends. This article at Linux.com has more information on building a Linux home media center. There’s also this guide by The MediaCenter Expert or this article by ZDNet’s George Ou.

Get creative with upgrades
Sure, you could do the standard mods and add WiFi or Bluetooth, but why not get adventurous with your modding? You could give the old laptop a snazzy wooden case mod, an extremely potent air-cooling system, or switch to the qwerty keyboard out for a Dvorak keyboard. Your imagination is the limit.

In the spirit of our previous post, what would you do?