Well, most of you saw the bezel or have heard the talk when we get together. I planned to put a 10.5" touchscreen in my custom bezel. If you hadn't heard of this project before, about two years ago in April I acquired a 10.5" touchscreen Kiosk PC that was out of Madison Square Garden. It was being used as an electronic ticketbooth, I believe, as it had card reader software on it, but also had tons of promo sports clips that look like it would've randomly played as screen savers. I stripped the case away from it, bought power supplies and such to put it in a car, and went to install it -- only to find out the motherboard for the unit was TOO BIG! D'oh, that should've been the first thing I tried. Earlier this year, since it was all too big, I bought a new motherboard. A Via Epia Mini-ITX board, it's roughly 6.5" by 6.5" -- the motherboard was SMALLER than the screen! I figured I'd just use the new motherboard and keep the LCD and touchscreen components from the Kiosk PC. I found out the hardway, you can't just expect to plug something in to something else and expect it to work. In my case, none of the plugs for the LCD or touchscreen would plug into the motherboard -- I'd have to take apart the plugs and then rewire them into new, standard plugs. That's where I stopped working on it. Well, a good 9 months later and here I am working on it again.
Well, the 10.5" screen is out of the question. Way too much would have to go into it, including hiring an electrical engineer to reverse engineer the plug's connections to create a different plug to make it work. I decided to ditch all of the components of the Kiosk PC and just start fresh with the new motherboard, and use a larger standard desktop harddrive rather than the 2gig laptop harddrive that the kiosk PC came with. So I grabbed one of the harddrives I had laying around in the basement, this one was a 20gig. Plugged it in, loaded it with Windows XP, and transfered all my mp3s over to that computer. Went onto the site that started this whole mess -- mp3car.com -- and I had a private message. Received it at 9:30pm, and it was the first time I visited the site in like 6 months. So I read it, and a guy was interested in buying my Kiosk PC because he cracked the LCD on the one he bought (the guy I bought mine from was selling them in the mp3car classifieds section, the thread was a good 50 pages long before they closed it). Anyway, by 11pm I had 80 bucks in my paypal account and the kiosk PC all boxed up.
Well, this got long, so here's the real update part. All I need to do now is purchase a new LCD touchscreen, and possibly a new power supply if I can't make what I have work. Thankfully, this new LCD touchscreen that I have my eye on has a single plug-in which either plugs into a standard monitor's vga plug, or USB. Makes me VERY happy.
Only down part is being unemployed, can't exactly get anywhere with that until I get some $$$. But, here's some cool pics of it all running on my desk here next to my normal comp.


Media Engine Frontend:


FrodoPlayer Frontend:


Road Runner FrontEnd:



Well, the 10.5" screen is out of the question. Way too much would have to go into it, including hiring an electrical engineer to reverse engineer the plug's connections to create a different plug to make it work. I decided to ditch all of the components of the Kiosk PC and just start fresh with the new motherboard, and use a larger standard desktop harddrive rather than the 2gig laptop harddrive that the kiosk PC came with. So I grabbed one of the harddrives I had laying around in the basement, this one was a 20gig. Plugged it in, loaded it with Windows XP, and transfered all my mp3s over to that computer. Went onto the site that started this whole mess -- mp3car.com -- and I had a private message. Received it at 9:30pm, and it was the first time I visited the site in like 6 months. So I read it, and a guy was interested in buying my Kiosk PC because he cracked the LCD on the one he bought (the guy I bought mine from was selling them in the mp3car classifieds section, the thread was a good 50 pages long before they closed it). Anyway, by 11pm I had 80 bucks in my paypal account and the kiosk PC all boxed up.
Well, this got long, so here's the real update part. All I need to do now is purchase a new LCD touchscreen, and possibly a new power supply if I can't make what I have work. Thankfully, this new LCD touchscreen that I have my eye on has a single plug-in which either plugs into a standard monitor's vga plug, or USB. Makes me VERY happy.


Media Engine Frontend:


FrodoPlayer Frontend:


Road Runner FrontEnd:






















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