External touchscreen (1 Viewer)

[dm15644]

Hi,

I want to have control over my HTPC without turning the projector on or using VNC. The display in my Silverstone LC-11 is not sufficient for this. After some research I'm considering this external 7" touchscreen:

LCD Touchscreen, TFT Monitor, Touchscreen Display, Touch Display, LCD Monitor | i:TV Media - iTV 7" Touch Screen Monitor Silber 443001 (German only, sorry)

The touchscreen would be nicely mounted on the wall in the correct height to conveniently operate it.

The main open issue is that projector and touchscreen need to run on different resolutions. Projector is 720x1280 @ 50 Hz, whereas the touchscreen needs to be at 480x800 @ 60 Hz. As I don't plan to use both displays simultaneously, I intend to define two profiles in Catalyst to be able to swap between touchscreen and projector.

Any comments on this?

Cheers,

jayrock

 

[kesar]

Right now I'm doing the same thing, but I've chosen touchscreen with higher resolution capability (1360/768). This way I can clone the display. I read that going your way may cause some problems. Read the forum. Maybe something has changed lately, I'm not sure.

 

[dm15644]

Hi kesar,

thanks for your comments!

The display is so cheap I couldn't resist and just got one. I hooked it up in a test rig with my laptop and it works very well. After new year's eve I will connect it to my HTPC (couple of parties planned in the next two weeks, so no fiddling with the live system during that period).

I'm going to use Hydravision to switch between projector and touchscreen, and I'm positive that this will fulfill all my needs. This way I will avoid clone mode, as only one display will be active at a time.

Which problems and which threads are you referring to specifically?

Where are you going to mount yours, will you put it up on the wall? This is what I plan to do.

Cheers,

jayrock

 

[PussyWagon]

Right now I'm doing the same thing, but I've chosen touchscreen with higher resolution capability (1360/768). This way I can clone the display. I read that going your way may cause some problems. Read the forum. Maybe something has changed lately, I'm not sure.

Im very curious, where did you find that touch screen? I have been looking for one that supports higher resolution so i could use it with clone mode activated. But it seems to be impossible to find anyone with widescreen support that is bigger than 7inches? Next size is 17inches??
Im also going to use it with my projector and dont want to turn it on only to play some music.

And as Jayrock im going to have it wallmounted too... Its going to be awesome!

Which skin are you guys going to use with touch screen? Im using Monochrome as this have large icons that is perfect for finger inputs. But the music section is not especially good for using with touch screen, its very hard to manage with finger inputs as you have to MOVE your mouse cursor over the albums to have them highlighted, but when using touch screen u cant only MOVE the mouse cursor. Because when clicking on album it will select it and jump into the selected album. Not only highlight it

Any workaround for this?

Jayrock: Hydravision? How will this work, is there some kind of hotkey that you will use for swapping displays in a fast way? Or is there an icon on desktop doing this? This would have been a solution for me if it is possible to doing it within MediaPortal and Without a keyboard?
Please explain, im very curious...

 

[dm15644]

Hi PussyWagon,

I'm using a modfied Blue3 Basic Home Screen with some icons stolen from Black&White (see attached), and then large icons in My Music. For playing an album I plan to use (a) the remote or (b) the topbar. If this doesn't work well I would modify the skins for My Music, but I hope this will not be necessary.

Worked well when testing on the desk, remains to be seen if it is ok on the wall.

Another way is to define "right click" as "double click", then double click on the folder and select Play All from the context menu.

Don't know really much detail about HydraVision yet, but it should be possible to define hotkeys to activate different profiles. I understand that this functionality has been moved from Catalyst to HydraVision. The plan is then to map these hotkeys to the remote. This will of course only wok with ATI graphics, for NVIDIA there seem to be other solutions but I haven't investigated that in detail. I read much positive feedback on UltraMon, but this is 40$ so I'll try with the free AMD solution first.

Cheers,

jayrock

 

[kesar]

PussyWagon
TOUCH SCREEN: I looked for my touchscreen all over the world. I wanted 8-9'' wide with as high resolution, as possible. 7'' is too small, I think, for my purpose. Finally I chose this one. This model accepts 1600/1200 signal. I tested it and it works nice. Look at their web site, they sell other models too. In general search the car-pc sellers. The Lilliput brand is well recognized there.
MOUNTING: I was inspired by Ruud's HTPC and I'm building my new case. It will be ready in January, so all pictures will be available and waiting for your opinions.
SKIN: Ruud suggested also the monochrome skin, since it has clearest GUI and causes no problems with cursor moves. I'm going to test it - in my current Revision 1 HTPC I use XFACE.
Happy Xmass,
kesar

 

[PussyWagon]

@PussyWagon
TOUCH SCREEN: I looked for my touchscreen all over the world. I wanted 8-9'' wide with as high resolution, as possible. 7'' is too small, I think, for my purpose. Finally I chose this one. This model accepts 1600/1200 signal. I tested it and it works nice. Look at their web site, they sell other models too. In general search the car-pc sellers. The Lilliput brand is well recognized there.
MOUNTING: I was inspired by Ruud's HTPC and I'm building my new case. It will be ready in January, so all pictures will be available and waiting for your opinions.
SKIN: Ruud suggested also the monochrome skin, since it has clearest GUI and causes no problems with cursor moves. I'm going to test it - in my current Revision 1 HTPC I use XFACE.
Happy Xmass,
kesar

So this touch screen is working in 1280x720? Isnt 8inches to small? I thought maybe 10-12" would have been perfect but maybe im wrong....

Some picture in action would have been nice!

 

[kesar]

It works, you'll see soon, when my project will be complete

 

[dm15644]

I actually find 7" sufficiently large, but this depends a lot on the way one actually intends to use the touchscreen. Another consideration was that I wanted to keep my first touch screen project at entry level investment size, in order to understand what can and what can't be done with a touch screen. If I run into problems with usability I will first try to fix it with software.

kesar: I'm really looking forward to hear about your results cause you're obviously going a slightly different path.

One more question, your screen seems to have the same physical resolution as the one I got (800x480), do you find this sufficient for 1360x768 input? I find the icons get really small when I run the touchscreen with more than 600 lines of input (just my personal taste).

Cheers,

jayrock

 

[kesar]

@kesar: I'm really looking forward to hear about your results cause you're obviously going a slightly different path.

One more question, your screen seems to have the same physical resolution as the one I got (800x480), do you find this sufficient for 1360x768 input? I find the icons get really small when I run the touchscreen with more than 600 lines of input (just my personal taste).

Cheers,

jayrock

I will post everything about my project mid of January, including build history, hardware selection and maybe some movies. There were many dilemmas, which I had to solve: device location, size, shape, finish, physical interfaces, functionalities, etc. This will be the effect of my design work. I also considered external touch screen location, but there is always a problem with cables, mounting and it changes nothing in functional area. It would, but only if the touch screen was located near my sofa - then I could operate everything laying down But then again - cables (at least 10m VGA + power supply + USB).

At the moment I can't say anything for sure about the resolution. It's too early. I just connected my ts to the current rig with VGA cable and it works. I didn't mess with USB interface and all configuration. I watched the movie about operating similar configuration from Ruud (the same HD Ready) and I was really impressed .

Regards,
kesar