41. 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!

Posted at 12:37PM on Nov 12th 2007 by r

42. well from my experience of trying to hack old laptops its sort of difficult to tap into the hardware. The most useful part is the flat screen but even interfacing that and providing power requires a lot of creativity. If you leave them intact and just extend the screen there are a lot of imbeding applications such as bar mounted media control.
good news is that some of the new old laptops have hardware like dvd drives and larger hard drives. Using the device to feed an LCD projector like we saw with the overhead projector would make a quick down and dirty media solution with a strong interface.
I have been thinking about integrating a machine into my car to tie in with my upgraded programmable systems like megasquirt. That two has its own unique set of problems and gifts. Screen and keyboard locations are problems but power supply is easier since you have an almost unlimited DC supply.
anywhere a computer is needed a laptop provides a nice clean package.

Posted at 12:54PM on Nov 12th 2007 by paige

43. I'm surprised no one has mentioned using it for a robot controller. Older laptops usually have serial and parallel ports, which can be interfaced to relay and sensor boards, they often already accept a DC power so they are easy to power from the lead-acid batteries or whatever the main power source is. With wi-fi they don't have to be quite so autonomous.

Posted at 12:58PM on Nov 12th 2007 by Rob Ristroph

44. Own personal speedtrap.

Connect it to a webcam and one of those cheap radar guns and keep an eye on the speed demons on your neighbourhood.

You 'll get them unless they hav an LCD shutter on their licenseplates. ;-)

Posted at 1:01PM on Nov 12th 2007 by Chris

45. >>> 45 RE: robot controller

I was thinking about an old laptop with ports and using it to handle the servos on a telescope to handle aim and focus with a digital cam set up to take pictures over the course of the evening.

Automate your star gazing and flip through the pictures the next morning type thing.

Posted at 1:08PM on Nov 12th 2007 by Blind

46. convert a laptop into an in-car entertainment system. the lcd panel folds down from the ceiling, and the base is moved somewhere down/in the dash. :)

Posted at 1:26PM on Nov 12th 2007 by umdk1d3

47. 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.

Posted at 1:33PM on Nov 12th 2007 by Tank

48. the best hack for old hardware hands down is to load your fav linux distro on it with openoffice and donate it. you would be surprised how many local low income families do not have pc's still. I've gotten more pc's to churches and charities this way that redistribute them to low income families that use them than i can shake a stick at.

Posted at 1:55PM on Nov 12th 2007 by chewy

49. 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.

Posted at 2:00PM on Nov 12th 2007 by Peter

50. Digital Signs.

I am the Director of IT for a school and for a while now they've wanted signs that they can update with current information. I'm hacking together 4 laptops digital picture frame style, with Wifi cards and whatever linux distro I decide. They're going to run a custom app I've written that watches an RSS feed and makes a "slideshow" (think powerpoint style) with updated news, lunch menu, schedule changes, etc. I'm saving us a bundle, a commercial system to do this is well over $5000

Posted at 2:09PM on Nov 12th 2007 by andrew

51. 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.

Posted at 2:17PM on Nov 12th 2007 by pablo

52. 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.

Posted at 2:22PM on Nov 12th 2007 by N athan

53. 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)

Posted at 2:48PM on Nov 12th 2007 by Wolf

54. I always thought it would be fascinating to hack the LCD to turn it into a really powerful LCD projector system. If you ever try and black out an LCD projector, there is always a little bit of light that gets through.

When working in a theatre, I found one of the toughest things to do was to project a nice clean video or presentation onto a backdrop in an otherwise dark theatre. I would like to try hacking the LCD so you put a theatre light behind it so you can control the fading in and out better to go from totally black to fully bright as smoothly as any other stage light.

Posted at 2:56PM on Nov 12th 2007 by Eliot

55. 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!

Posted at 2:58PM on Nov 12th 2007 by strider_mt2k

56. I use an old Dell Inspiron laptop as a car computer.
I took the screen off (I might use that in another project), and resealed the laptop. It fits perfectly under my seat. I made all the wiring as a "quick disconnect" type, so I can take the system out from under the seat if I need to. I wired the reset and power buttons to a remote that is a part of my center console.
For a screen, I got an 8-inch SVGA touchscreen that allows me to interact with the system easily while I am driving.
Two 7 port USB hubs are connected to the laptop's two ports. One of these hubs is located inside the dash, and connects the GPS, IR remote, car audio, engine sensor (OBD-II), forward facing webcam, touchscreen, and a spare cable for a USB thumb drive or USB Wi-Fi which allows for an external antenna. The second hub is located in the cargo compartment in the center console. This hub will eventually incorporate additional sensors, such as a multi-axis accelerometer (For location fixing with intermittent GPS signal), enhanced "quick controls" through re-wired USB keyboards, an EV-DO modem (when I start making money). Both USB hubs are powered using the same DC-AC power adapter (Which is also controlled by a dash switch).
Using an open source "Front End", the system has an easy to use graphic user interface that allows me to access common functions while I'm driving (Navigation, Music, Engine Diagnostics, and eventually web cam recordings with speed and location overlays).

The best thing about this system was that it cost me almost nothing to get it together. The big ticket item was the display. I've got a geardo father who got me the display as a birthday present. I spent $18 total on the USB hubs. Everything else was already lying around from previous projects.

Taking apart the dash was the most daunting part of the project, and running the cabling was probably the most difficult.

Posted at 3:20PM on Nov 12th 2007 by Static

57. Not terribly sexy, but how about installing linux and handing it off to an aspiring hacker?

Or mom, so she can check her email and surf the web.

Posted at 3:26PM on Nov 12th 2007 by BII

58. I have a few limping laptops, some I nursed back to health and others hingeless or screenless.

I'm working on a paperless workflow project, so I can scan all of my notes and paper into the computer and toss them.

The iBook G4 (with the classic Apple colors added beneath the apple on the lid) is aiming towards having the touchpad from an old PDA embedded into the palm rest, for taking notes without a really expensive touchscreen.

[allen]'s comment is interesting since I'm currently machining a case for another iBook from aluminum. This is going to be one piece, tablet style. It will network with my desktop for mouse and keyboard control, and will control the Velleman K8055 board I bought for my dorm room automation.

The third, screenless iBook is tentatively going to be stripped of everything but the important bits and stuffed into something awesome. Current ideas are: remote control helicopter, weather balloon, kite, Apple TV cousin, or web controller for a more complicated lighting project I'd like to do in the future. I'll probably mill a case for this one too, so it will be interchangeable between several projects.

I managed to snag handfuls of *useless* parts when I was gutting laptops at my middle school. Laptops are excellent sources for great LEDs, fans, and most importantly, microphones! I have a bag of laptop microphones that I'm going to work into projects sometime. I'm planning on a pocket sized recording set up. I may use the stripped laptop to record with the microphones, or create individual modules for each microphone that could write to a USB drive or send signals back to a main computer.

I'm not doing this myself, but one idea I've heard thrown around for laptops is an organized Roomba colony for efficiently vacuuming large areas and buildings.

I really like the window dimming idea! Sounds like a bit over the top, but it could be really good if done right.

Posted at 3:49PM on Nov 12th 2007 by Dean Putney

59. Hello!
My idea:

slim-sized HTPC-system with

-remote control over ir (any remote)and network
-possible to view EPG (Electronic program guide) and set recording timer with gsm-phone
-video streaming (multicasting) over LAN,
-using self made smartcard reader with pay-tv cards
-sharing pay-tv cards over LAN to other computers
-digital TV (DVB-t in europe) (3 tuners for multiple concurrent recordings)
-recording to network server
-passive cooling
-RGB-scart for TV

I have this system already working with normal ATX-hardware. It would be nice to build smaller version with parts from laptop... I have code, you have hardware =) Interested?

Posted at 4:24PM on Nov 12th 2007 by Supercool

60. 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.

Posted at 4:30PM on Nov 12th 2007 by Virion