White Wire Basket with Lath and Chain

White Wire Basket with Lath and Chain

Image by cobalt123

White Wire Basket on the Rack

Image by cobalt123

Wooden Touchscreen Terminal - front

Image by barnoid
This is a 15" LCD touchscreen with a Celeron 633MHz board with 128MB RAM in a wooden case of my construction. The case also contains the PSU. The bottom part of the screen surround hinges down to allow access to the monitor controls. The button mounted on the base is the power button and indicator light.

It has no hard drive and boots using PXE from my server, then mounts its filesystem over NFS. It runs Debian Linux, xorg, XFCE4, Metacity and Firefox. The button on the left of the panel at the bottom of the screen pops up a screen keyboard.

Currently I'm a bit concerned about the amount of heat that builds up from the PSU (reaches 75°C after a while), an external PSU might be required. Also it tends to run out of RAM when viewing stuff on google video (no swap, no hard drive).

Update: I've done some work on the insides, see here. It still looks the same on the outside.

Further update: I've switched from the above described software to running KDE. More details here.

Wooden Touchscreen Terminal - latest update

Image by barnoid
Here's my wooden terminal again. Changes since I last posted about this are quite a few.

Memory is now at 512MB.

I stuck a slightly bigger heat sink on the processor and removed the fan. It runs fine like this and hasn't had any overheating problems. The upshot of this is that the machine now has no moving parts and is completely silent!

I got a very short (25cm) monitor cable from Lindy. Made the cables much tidier, but didn't improve the screen sharpness noticeably, as I was hoping it would.

I added a speaker socket on the back so at some point in the future I can use some external (wooden) speakers without needing the keep the front flap down all the time. I removed the non-working speakers from inside.

I put in an IDE to compact flash adaptor. The adaptor is accessible from under the front flap. My plan is to use the Linux suspend2 patch to resume from an image on the CF card with the aim of reducing the time it takes to get ready. I'm still working on making this work properly.

See also: the front for the original information and iterations one and two of the internals.

Yellow Stripe Chaise with Fringe.

Image by cobalt123
Out on the patio deck with the sun starting to set.