Assembling the Base

To finish the hardware end of the project, the base assembly needed to be made durable enough to hold up to the inevitable tugs on the display cable and, as it turned out, gravity. Aesthetics were less important for the base than the display since it would be in the background when using the reader. At the same time, I'd see the base at least when turning the reader on, so I didn't want it to look too shoddy. 

The size of the parallel port I chose to use in my adapter to connect the display cable to the base made it impossible to enclose it within the base housing. I had considered using the laptop's built-in parallel port but dismissed the idea since making the necessary connections would have been hellish. Instead, I decided to run the adapter's wiring along the top of the base and have the parallel port jut out from the back of the base. That way, the keyboard would still be usable if necessary, and the base with the cable connected would remain fairly thin compared to having the port jut upward.

The adapter, completed

The first step was to finish the adapter a bit to fit the base. With a top plastic piece removed that covered the display socket removed from the base, there was a depression or groove along the base's top edge. I bent the adapter around so the wiring would fit more-or-less within the groove when plugged into the socket and so the parallel port pointed toward the back of the base. Then, I finished the adapter by wrapping the wires with electrical tape to form them into a short and fairly rigid cable.

With the adapter plugged into the socket, the added wiring prevented the plastic piece from being replaced on the base giving it a pretty unfinished look. So I cut a chunk out of the plastic piece to allow it to be attached to the base with the wiring extending through it. The adapter's short cable then ran along the top of the plastic piece to the parallel port instead of resting in the groove.

The adapter still needed something to hold it in place. The hinge covers were left over from having removed the display from the base. By screwing these to the plastic piece with a few small wood screws, I managed to repurpose the hinge covers to both hold the adapter in place and cover the tape-constructed adapter cable. As an added aesthetic bonus, the hinge covers' plastic matched that of the base housing. All in all, I thought the result didn't look half bad.

If only that had been enough. Unfortunately, the combined weight of the parallel port and the connector at the base end of the parallel cable leading to the display created a torque around the edge of the base sufficient to lift and pop off the plastic piece intended to hold the adapter in place.

After thrashing around a while thinking about the problem, I concluded that the easiest solution would be to add some type of rigid shelf to hold the port up. I had some scrap sheet metal that could be used but didn't want to deal with measuring it and cutting it and smoothing the edges at that point. Then I remembered a metal plate left over from a past dissection of a trusted college companion, my old Sharp scientific calculator. Digging the plate out of a closet, I attached it to the base, and - voila! - I had a shelf for the port. A little Velcro helped to keep the port in place on the shelf and, lacking the screw connections on the port housing, to hold the connected cable to the port.

But that still wasn't good enough for me. No, I later decided that the base just had to rest leaning against a wall on its right side. That caused gravity to pull the at the port toward the right side in the picture above, along the surface of the shelf. It eventually got to be too much for the Velcro, at which point I used some wire to lash the port to the shelf so it couldn't move in any direction. Fortunately, the metal plate had holes conveniently available to be used for the purpose.

The end product was a little less than perfect, but that's okay because... It worked!

And that's it for the hardware modifications! Well, almost... After all was said and done, I made one last alteration in the interest of environmentalism, which I'll discuss at a later date.

Still to come... The software side of things...

Assembling the Display

With the proof-of-concept trial done, it was now necessary to make things durable enough to be usable and finished enough to not distract from reading. Between the base and the display, the display was the more important in this respect since it would be the more jostled and bumped around of the two and would be the one that I'd be spending time looking at.

Different displays with different available space, materials, wiring location, and etc. will require different solutions to this problem.  Depending on your situation, you may need to be pretty clever and crafty to come up with a workable arrangement.  In my case, it took a bit of rigging to get things to work out...

The size of the display connector and the space in the display housing had already been considered.  I was sure the connector could be made to fit one way or another.  So, the first step was to cut an opening through which it would extend. This I accomplished by carving out parts of the top and bottom of the housing with a Dremel.

The intent was to bolt the connector directly to the housing, but was a bit of a tight squeeze and it turned out that there wouldn't be a way to do it securely. To get around those problems, I cut a metal picture hanger* in half and bolted each half to one side of the connector to form mounting extensions. Then I used the Dremel to cut the housing in places to fit the extensions as solidly as possible. Finally, I was able to fit the housing together and had a fairly decent connector added to the display.

Unfortunately, several of the wires were ripped out of their fragile connections in the process of fitting the connector. After a lot of tedious resoldering, the display was reassembled and tested. It worked pretty well at first. But the connector was a bit loose, and I found it possible to wiggle it enough to short something and cause the computer to reboot.

Reopening the display, I wedged a couple of small nuts between the housing and extensions, and then applied cyanoacrylate adhesive (i.e. “super glue”) to hold things in place. I also applied some of the glue to the connector extension nut/bolt connections to keep them from loosening.

The display was again reassembled and tested after everything had dried. Finally, I had a good, solid connector that was rugged enough for normal use and didn't seem to look too bad.

* If you're going to mod stuff, it helps to have a lot of junk lying around. :)