OK, this is my first post, so go easy on a lurker who's finally de-cloaking...
So I've built up 2 seperate webplayers now... one for a digital picture frame and one for an MP3 player (for my stereo system) & MP3 file server for my home network.
My first webplayer involved just adding a 6gb hard drive, painting the side rails silver, and adding a wireless ethernet card. The cool thing was the wireless ethernet. As it turns out, the Linksys WMP11 pci card actually has a mini-pci card hidden beneath it's RF shield. Simply de-solder the rf-shield (the mini-pci card has it's own rf shield) and the antena connection and you're good to go. The drivers work great, and don't have a PCMCIA fake adapter driver link the dell card does. And you get an antenna too... The only thing I'm not totally happy with is my attena mount... it's simply held in with pressure, super glue, and epoxy. I think it might fall off if hit hard enough. Oh... and of course I have a HD activity light also. It pulls the pictures from a cool HTML/javascript page I wrote that randomy pulls pictures from my website and randomy does from direct-X transition on them. Check out the full picture set at http://www.xkill.net/rcaslis/computers/EvilInsideJr/index.html
The next system was more complicated. I started the same way - Linksys wireless ethernet, and a 20GB HD. I replaced the amber sleep LED with a blue one, and replaced the power and HD lights with red LEDs. I moved the audio out port to the back (even covered the holes in the front with an epoxy blob so there are no holes. I then upgraded the memory to 128MB and added heatsinks to the LCD chip and wireless ethernet card. I added a lagsana cooler to the CPU and overclocked to 233 mhz. The audio out port and wireless antena are mounted to a perfboard where the modem connectors used to be - nice and solid. And of course, I painted it a nice graphite grey and added a hole so the CPU fan could breath. Full picture set at http://www.xkill.net/rcaslis/computers/EvilInsideMP3/index.html
I think I had every problem from paint that rubs off too easy to broken solder joints to accidentally epoxying the sleep switch to itself to a flaky LCD connector.
What do you all think?
- Russ
