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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."
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.
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
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
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
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
IBM's PS/2 Model 95 (one of the last PS/2 MCA-bus machines, mainly for use as a server) came with a built-in LCD display... there's now a Linux driver for it.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
http://www.overclockers.com.au/techstuff/a_diy_lcd
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.