Slashdot Mirror
Best Way To Put a Monitor On a Robot?
I'm part of my schools IGVC team, and we're upgrading our bot's computer to an onboard mini-itx. Most of the access to the box is gonna be through ssh, but I want a terminal I can just mount on the bot for convenience. Bidding on a psOne LCD already, but what are some good options if that doesn't pan out? I want to keep it as cheap as possible and small (in the 5-7 inch range). I haven't found any good guides to modding a digital photo frame or portable DVD player, but I'm probably just not looking in the right places.
I've done similar work before for mounting monitors on ships. Get some thin aluminum bars, and then bend and braze them so that they form an end to a cage with the monitor screen unobstructed (bend four bars along their long axis and then cut and braze them together so that the monitor fits into the cage end). Depending on how you mount it, you may want to add other bars. You will probably also want to put impact padding inside the cage-end and strap-down cables or some other capture method to prevent the monitor from falling out backwards. If you know what you are doing, it will take you half an hour and it will be steady as a rock.
There are a number of 7" VGA LCD displays with touchscreens in use in the car computer hobbyist community. The low-end ones are around USD $250-$300.
http://store.mp3car.com/category_s/27.htm
http://www.logicsupply.com/categories/lcd_displays
http://digitalww.com/store/products.asp?cat=8
Take a look around there and I'm sure you'll find something that will work quite well.
Hey, I'm into the car-PC scene (where we replace our stock radio's with computers & touchscreens, in order to have all the features of the best touch-screen navigation/head units, in addition to things such as internet (wifi/edge/etc), engine management, etc..) [/carputer plug]
We frequently use LCD's in the 6-8" size, but they're usually touch-screen and that may be overkill for your application. If it's not, though, a good bang-for-the-buck 7" touchscreen is the Lilliput 7" touchscreen - ~$250. If you want something a little better, try the Xenarc 7" - ~$350 (I personally use the Xenarc 7" 700TSV and have tested the Lilliput 7".. I have only great things to say about Xenarcs)
The touchscreens connect to your computer via USB and the video source can be either VGA or a single RCA coaxial.
If you're on a budget, my best advice would be to search for a cheap Lilliput non-touchscreen in the size you want. A quick google search came up with this 7" Lilliput for $120
If you want touchscreens, a good place to start is www.mp3car.com. Non-touchscreens are less popular in the carputing world, so you will probably have better luck with google for those.
New webcomic updated on Sundays: HERE
What I used on the robot for my EE senior project was a serial LCD from seetron.com
It took the serial port data form a 16bit microcontroller and displayed it on screen. We used it mostly for text feedback but also used the low end graphics to display a graph of what our analog sensors saw in real time.
Probably low end for what you want but still a good option for embedded hardware hackers out there, as they could run it off of a pic or Basic Stamp. Will except TTL or RS232 voltage levels.
ALL the LCD picture frames I've owned/bought as gifts had a "video in" port of some sort or other on them. No modding necessary. And they're all clear about what sort of power to feed them to make 'em work. Smaller ones can be found for cheap, too.