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Adding an LCD Status Screen to a PC
blankmange writes: "The Screensavers is running an interesting hack - add an LCD screen to your PC for just information. "The real estate on your screen is precious, and with your PC's vital stats, Winamp info, game stats, stock tickers, news tickers, sports scores, and more, it's easy to run out of space. How about adding a liquid crystal display (LCD) that can show this type of information?" Seems pretty straight-forward ... " Yes, but can you make one as as pretty as this one?
Here are the specs:
21. Technical Specifications
Motherboard
VIA Epia Mini-ITX with embedded VIA C3-800mHz proccessor, intergrated AC'97 sound, SP/DIF, LAN, VGA, TV-Out, S-Video, 2xUSB, COM, LPT, 2x512Mb PC133 memory.
HDD
Hitachi model TX230A-40gB 2,5" notebook HDD connected throug a 3,5"---> 2,5" converter.
DVD/CD-R(w)
Slim-line Sony model CRX-800E.
Graphic LCD Display
Datavision DG24128-5-S1-FLBY 240x128Pxl Graphic Display, powered by software from Mr. ChronoM, with backlight and contrast control.
Internal RF receiver for Keyboard and Mouse
Trust Wireless Keyboard and Mouse 300KD, totally stripped and connected directly to the motherboard.
HDD activity indicator
20LED HDD activity indicator with fully adjustable sensitivity and brightness controll. Colours: green, orange, red, blue, red high-density.
Developed and build by Mr. Loepie
Power supply
220Vac Enchance Model SFX-1209F Micro ATX 90Watts powersupply, fully stripped and mounted into the base of the computer, cooling by 1 x 4cm fan.
Lights
1 x Black-Light 10cm CCFL behind the frontpanel.
1 x Green 10cm CCFL between the HDD and the DVD/ CD-R(w).
2 x Blue 10cm CCFL in base, switchable.2 x 20 Red High-density LEDs in the base, switchable.
Cables
Coolermaster rounded IDE cable.
Coolermaster rounded floppycable. cut in two for connection of the Graphic LCD display.
All power cables are custom-made by Bart_Banaan.
Casefans
Titan 8cm model TFD-8025M12B-2 ball bearing in top
of computer as circulation fan with BioHazard fingerguard.
Titan 4cm model TFD-4010M12B-2 ball bearing in the base of the computer for extraction of warm air.
It isn't the first time that this is suggested, and with the increase of case mods posts recently (and others sort of mods), this would make sense.
Personally, I would use two monitors.
You can use a crappy one just for this sort of stuff. It will have much more real state that an LCD and colors. And it's much simpler! just a second video card or a multihead one.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
isn't really a brand new idea.
The LCDproc ( site currently down) and lcd4linux and
some other projects have been around for quite some time now.
I have created an USB Interface for LCD modules that has some advantages over the usual serial or parallel port hack. I hope to release it soon.
-- www.linux-laser.org - Open Source Laser Show Software for Linux
is a 6" color VGA display run off of a PCI VGA card in the system. Maximum PC had such a system as one of their "Rig of the Month".
But I don't even if know if it's possible...
I'm not really into tweaking syslogd but,
/dev/lcd?
how much difiiculty will it be to route system messages (illegal logins / diskspace low etc) to
that would make the thing pretty usefull as the current software seems to be windows-only
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Such radical mods are silly, because of Moore's Law. I mean, what's the point in sweating blood for something that looks k001 that will be so much dragging it's feet in less than 6 months that you'll want to kick it everytime you boot the darn thing? Of course, one can plan ahead and make room for improvements, say, swapping the motherboard.
Ooooooo..... kinda like mood rings for computers?
Neato.
Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen.
JaLCDs or LCDSmartie for instance. There are WinAmp plugins and step-by-step instructions for the do-it-yourselfer (sorry, those are in German, there should be English ones out there, too).
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
It is possible, and I have seen it done. The brand I saw used was Beta Brite, and I think you could get them at Sam's. That was about 4 years ago, and you had to build a special serial interface cable because I think the signs have a cat 3 jack, or something. Then, you just send commands to the serial port, probably with some control characters to scrolling effects, etc.
My flatmate has been working on this system which shows any image you want. All you need to do is write a script which picks an image and then run a program to transmit it over the network to the display every few seconds. Things like weather, news or mail.
I wanted to link it with my camera robot and have a few buttons on the side to control it.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
My computer lives inside the desk, where its fans are muffled by the enclosure (with a large, low speed high volume QUIET fan ventilating the desk). I couldn't see an LCD on the computer.
How about an LCD panel on a USB, so that I could mount the LCD up where I could see it?
Or better still, how about just running more than one monitor - and having screen real estate I can use for ANYTHING?
www.eFax.com are spammers
Of course, status displays have been around a long time. You've seen the panel of blinking lights on 1960's computers -- those showed contents of CPU registers, I/O channel activity, etc. Just looking at the pattern you could see the status. Some machines also had summary displays on the panel -- so you could look at the "IDLE" light instead of recognizing the pattern of the Idle Loop addresses on the instruction address register lights.
I always wondered what he did with the thing after the novelty of playing the game wore off.
at least he could salvage the screen for something like this
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Virtual Desktops.
>
already... Bummer.
VFDs are the displays on cash registers etc. You can program one quite easily via the serial port. You can see one implementation here.
is a seperate lcd screen that had winamp, my instant messengers, and other small background apps. Just to get them off my screen. This would be extra cool because I could play counterstrike on one screen and have AIM on another. Thus preventing CS from fudging if I get an IM.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Why would I want an LDC to tell me what OS and/or what build of IE I'm running?? Should be telling me system performance and processor usage...
Carpe Canem - Seize the Dog
"The real estate on your screen is precious, and with your PC's vital stats,
Winamp info, game stats, stock tickers, news tickers, sports scores, and
more, it's easy to run out of space...."
Use WindowMaker (or similar wm) and you'll never again worry about lack of
screen real estate. You can have as many screens as you need or want and
move between them fast and easy. The number of programs you can
run/display is only limited by RAM/swap.
I prefer WindowMaker and have three machines all displaying on one monitor
with one keyboard controllng them (all connected via OpenSSH.) Then there
are additional VCs. Lack of screen real estate has never been an
issue.
Perhaps this mod has "blinky light" value, but the screen real estate issue
is a non issue for Linux users.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
I went dumpster diving for over 20 portable dumb terminals. 9" screens with a carrying handle molded into the case. The keyboards fold up and clip on in front of the screen. I had one hooked up to the serial port on my firewall and would also tail -f /var/log/messages. Once you get live ipchains and snort reports, you tend not to want to go back.
But now I'm more interested in finding a good 9-10" X term suitable for keeping Big Brother up 24x7.
Intelligent Life on Earth
Synaptics has a new touchpad for notebooks called the cPad. It has a B&W LCD under a (mostly) clear touchpad that can be used as a secondary display. It has it's own API, and looks pretty neat - it saves valuable screen space and I hope I could move the task bar down there. I've only seen it on the Toshiba Satellite 5100 series, but I'm sure Synaptics is agressively marketing it to other laptop manufacturers.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
...buy another screen. Half decent 2D PCI graphics cards are under £20 and monitors can be had for next to nothing if you get them from companies that are upgrading their systems. I've found it slightly tricky to get multiple monitors working under Mandrake 8 (yes, I'm sure I should upgrade), but Windows 98 and XP handle it fine.
What my system looks like.
If a square is really a rhombus, why aren't all triangles purple?
The Toshiba 5105 uses the Synaptics cPad, a touch sensitive LCD screen as a touchpad mouse. I haven't been able to find any information needed to create an open source device driver, though Synaptics web site does document the Windows API. I've wanted to use this device for various information displays in Linux (like Gkrellm, but so far requests to Toshiba and Syntaptics have been fruitless. :-(
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
What I'd like is a TCP port spectrum analyser - just plug it in to your server, and see the traffic going in and out of each port.
:-)
If a virus or a worm starts "calling home" on a high port, it'd be immediately obvious
I am using an LCD since past month. It's a 16x2 one, controlled by a Hitachi HD7780. Since I'm not in USA, importing a CristalFontz or Matrix Orbital one were impo$$ible.
:)
:(
I've found this on a electronics junkyard for US$5, got an old printer cable and soldered everything as found on LCDProc's (search freshmeat for it) man page.
A picture of it can be found here:
lcd_no_painel.png
LCDProc runs on *nix, is damn easy to configure and to write a "plugin". Since it's networked, just a few lines of Perl code and you can write something that flashes the backlight and display some important syslog line...
There are some modifications you can do it, such as inverting (removing a plastic thing inside it and putting it back there, flipp'd 180 degrees) the colors, so the back'll be black and the letters'll be green. I'm about to do this next week (when I get time).
Some guys also changed the backlight LEDs (blue ones everyone?), but it's difficult to find SMD things here
Several months ago there was an article on /. about the BriQ, a powerful Linux/PowerPC box squeezed into the size of a CDROM drive. The only connectivity of the unit is an ethernet jack, a serial port, and the front panel. A couple weeks ago I was given a project at work to develop a menu system/UI that would run on the front panel of a BriQ to be used as a demonstration unit. The BriQ's front panel consists of a 20x2 VFD display, a tri-color (red, green, yellow) LED, and 2 buttons.
Control of the panel is simple: writing to /dev/lcd displays characters on the VFD (or changes the LED color w/ control characters), and reading from /dev/lcd gets the state of the buttons. I was able to develop a UI (in Perl) that used those buttons and the display to not only display status messages, but perform basic system tasks like rebooting and setting manual network configuration settings.
Unfortunately none of the displays that I've seen online have included anything in the way of input on the same serial connection, which would increase the usefulness of these status displays immensely. C'mon, don't tell me X (especially w/ proprietary drivers like nVidia or Matrox) has never frozen on you, leaving you to find some other machine to ssh in from and fix things. With a simple secondary I/O system like the one on the BriQ, one could not only have a really cool gadget, but also provide a needed backup interface for those computers that do double-duty as workstations and servers. Or even to get monitorless servers started up on strange networks w/out DHCP.
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
Anyone written something like this to drive a Palm device sitting in a cradle ? I have a pretty handspring Prism at the end of a USB link that would be ideal if there was software...
This article is just bad. The author doesn't have any pictures to go with the instructions. There's no shot of the "final product" etc. How does he expect people to be drawn into the mod without SHOWING what the mod looks like? sheesh, lame.
-- DuckWing
These guys:
Massworks
Have a LCD touch-panel that plugs in via USB to your PC. Not an incredibly high refresh rate, but it appears to work quite well.
I'm thinking about mounting one in my car hooked into a custom PC stowed away in the trunk. Would make a nice MP3 player and probably could view DiVXs and such through it.
A bit expensive, but not too bad. Only two cables needed - USB & Power.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
I don't know about you, but I have more space than I know what to do with. Hell, 4 of my 10 desktops are empty.
Jake
Dating: while( 1 ){ call_girl(); get_rejected(); drink_40(); } return 0;
If you really want to see some great pc modding, you should look here. This guy buys a small tv screen and puts it into his case. Other mods include water-cooling and window modding.
Screen real estate is extremely valuable, but the way to recover it is certainly not to move things onto a miniature secondary screen. Virtual desktops are a much better solution. Most Linux UIs support them, and if you use Litestep, so can Windows. The concept is simple: have several "virtual" screens and switch between them. That way, you can put all your "overhead" windows (ICQ, Winamp/XMMS, tickers, file manager) on one screen, Mozilla on another, etc, and switch between them with a mouse click. You can also gain space by getting rid of the stuff that wastes it, like adware, or by keeping it minimized.
Of course, you can also gain more screen real estate by investing in hardware, but if you're going to do that it makes far more sense to get a bigger or second monitor than a black+white LCD screen.
You could use it for /. headlines too. [grin]
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Puhleeez. Desktop Real Estate is a phrase they use in PC Magazine for Pete's Sake! Am I the only one who, when seeing this phrase, immediately assumes that the author is a fucktard?
I say we immediately begin abusing anyone who uses this phrase.
Thank you for your attention to this matter
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Great idea! Anyone??
http://www.overclockers.com.au/techstuff/a_diy_lcd
About 19 months ago, I decided to get an LCD display for my monitorless 486... its primary job is NAT (previously using a 56k modem w/PPP, now using the cable modem w/ethernet). Matrix Orbital displays connect to the serial port and have a really simple interface (it displays a character for every character you send, commands are prefixed by 0xFE, then a code for the command).
I went looking around, and it seems there aren't too many places to get the displays from in Canada. I ordered from HVW Technologies, which even has a student discount if you provide a scanned image of your student card. Their displays section includes units both with and without drive bay mounting kits. Their prices are reasonable, and their response time was great. I've got a picture of my (custom-written) uptime program here.
When I wrote the software, LCDproc was about the only program that was any good, and it kept flickering because it'd send a "clear screen" code before every update. I have no idea if that's been fixed in the interim, but I took the opportunity to write my API for a Grade 11 project (got 100%!).
I'd rather just add a second monitor...
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
I got this cheap 5.5" B/W TV when my parents bought something and got it as a gift. Would anyone happen to know any programs i could use for the same effect ? - Using gForece 2 MX for the output...
The Crystalfontz 633 may be exactly what you are looking for. I just received one in the mail a couple of days ago, and I'm using it for my car MP3 player interface. I haven't done much with it yet, but so far, it is *very* cool.
Have fun, and play safe.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
i was wondering the same thing. i got a dec hinote ultra 2 from work and the computer died so i kept the display. any way of hooking it up to my pc (any site i found about it is in chinese). thanks
‹shameless self promotion› in university. Actually, I got to do it in class with the Cyberman himself, Steve Mann. :)
Dr.Mann liked it enough to put it on his website
http://wearcam.org/dusting/ece385fame2001/lcd/
‹/shamless self promotion›
This is left as an exercise for the reader.
Unfortunately none of the displays that I've seen online have included anything in the way of input on the same serial connection, which would increase the usefulness of these status displays immensely.
How about a little box with an Ethernet interface, 40x2 VFD, IR control, and audio output to boot?
The SliMP3 has an open control protocol which makes it easy to put things up on the display, capture IR key presses, and stream audio to the device. There is also an HTTP API if you don't want to roll everything yourself, and just want automated mail notifications etc.
I would love to have some sort of vga lcd screen, miniature (maybe 4x5" or so), that just runs a console off serial. Theoretically this should be cheaper than a full-blown 1024x768 LCD monitor, but economies of scale, etc.. i guess. Anyone see anything like this? I think it would be sweet to put that on the side of a box and stand it on a desk. Instant server.
Of course, Yoshi did not add an LCD screen to the system, he added a VCD. But they why should I start expecting technical accuraccy from The ScreenSavers at this point?
:)
Could have been worse: Leo LaPorte could have been there, and the segment would have run long because he wouldn't shut up.
I don't know why exactly this was such a big story, it's little more than a plug-and-play upgrade with all the software that's available. I had such a display connected to a Tand CoCo 3 via serial port back in the 1980s. Nice to see the Wintel and GNU/Linux worlds catching up.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
I purchased a 10.4" LCD panel w/ an Elo touchscreen from http://www.allelec.com/ and mounted it in the side of an AT case for my linux box. It makes a great little closet machine, and I don't have to lug a monitor over to it when I need to use the console. The touchscreen seems to be only accurate within a small area (at least in X), but that's okay since I didn't pay the extra $200 for it. Unexpected goodies are cool.
this would be pretty cool if it were a touch screen, and you could alter the stats shown, and the view/layout from the touch screen. heck, i'd buy one if it did that. fully customizable, multi-view, touch-screen operated system monitor? screw it, i'm gunna stick with watching syslog on the spare monitor...
Hi
l t. asp
Try this link to one of the ITX sites. There current waht to do with a iTX MB uses a ton of led and one hugh LCD pannel.
http://www.miniitx.com/projects/spacecase/defau
Comment removed based on user account deletion
so much for the funny moderation today...hehehe
("I" found it funny..hehehe)
; )
Carpe Canem - Seize the Dog
It requires an external controller, which will run you around $200. In other words, it's very much not worth it.
It looks like the SpaceCase guy made a standalone LCD display too, and it looks pretty easy to make (perhaps 3 or 4 hours with all the components ready?). His looks a (bit) like a mini Apple Cinema Display! If I can find the panel I think I'll have a go... ;-)
http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/spacepanel/