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The iPhone Inspired DIY Kitchen Touch Screen Project
Author : Ryan - Auckland, New Zealand email

   

                              

The Scope

For years my wife has been on at me to put a computer into the kitchen where she can manage her recipes, shopping lists, to do lists and access the internet for looking up various things.  After looking at a couple of pretty basic and well overpriced commercial units we decided to have a crack at doing this ourselves.

Her requirements:
- must be discrete and look like a digital picture frame when not being used.
- must be touchscreen.
- must have internet access.
- must be easy to use and not crash often (she's used to windows vista)
- must have barcode scanner for managing her kitchen database.
- the wires and techo stuff must be hidden and out of sight.
- should be able to view what's on the lounge TV in the kitchen.


Touch Screen Monitor

First thing on the list was to locate a reasonable priced touch screen monitor.  As we wanted to use this as a digital photo frame when not in use we decided to use a 4:3 aspect monitor so that when displaying photos there was no need for stretching or black bars to show images in full screen.

         

I decided to use an "open frame" touch screen monitor as these come with no plastic case and are just the bare touchscreen and exposed metal case, going this way ensured I got the smallest unit possible and could easily build and fit a wooden frame to this.

I imported a ELO 19" 4:3 open frame SAW touch screen monitor from Hong Kong (with a large amount of other equiptment for another job), these are a commercial touch screen made for kiosks etc, the monitor that arrived was very good quality the screen is vandal and water proof also which is perfect for if we ever have any kids or have drunk friends over.

The connections are very simple, 1 x 12vDC power feed, 1 x USB for driving the touch screen and a VGA and DVI sockets for connecting to a video feed.

I plugged this into my laptop to test and literally within 5 minutes the thing was setup, calibrated and working.


Computer Hardware

Initially for the prototype I used an old 2.0ghz dell that we have lying around but after doing some testing I realized that to stream television and music,  run the weather station, home automation and to do a few other background tasks that we would be better just building a new PC for this purpose rather than to frustrate my wife with a potentially slow user experience.
         
So Christmas 2010 came 11 months early and off I went to our local hardware supplier and picked up the following:

1 x Gigabyte H55M-UD2H Intel P55 Motherboard
2 x 2GB DDR3 Memory Modules
1 x  Intel Core i5 650 3.20GHz Processor
1 x Western Digital 800GB 32MB SATA II Caviar Green Hard Drive
1 x Copy of Windows 7 Professional  (the most expensive part here)
1 x Coolermaster Elite 333 Mid Tower Case

      

I haven't built a computer in probably 8 years so it was an "educational" night putting everything together and noting how many small things have changed in the last 8 years.  (I nearly took the SATA hard drive back because the IDE cable woud'nt fit onto it) 

But in the end, in the legendary  words of Borat    "Great Success!"   Everything fitted together and even powered up.

Installation / House Modification

We ran the prototype up on the kitchen bench for a week to make sure the whole idea was feasible and would actually work.  After a week we could easily see the benefits of having a computer in the kitchen and decided to go ahead with the in wall installation.

It then took me another 2 weeks to get up the guts to cut a hole in the kitchen wall of our new house.

We were lucky that the wall we wanted to mount the screen in to was a non supporting / non structural wall so it was just a matter of cutting a hole, emptying out the honeycomb supporting material in side and running some wires.

In the second photo below (with the artwork) you can see a small "incident" that happened when I hit a chisel too hard when trying to tidy up an edge and punched a hole right thru the wall to the other side.  Luckily for me the hole ended up directly behind some artwork where I was able to hide it for a few days until I got the courage to break it to my wife (and kindly ask her to fix it)

       

Once the hole was made I spend a good two hours wiring up the 240v stuff and feeding the required wires and cables inside the wall into a small cabinet under the bench that will hold this computer and a bunch of other parts of our home network.

      

Above you can see the wooden frame that I built for the touch screen, I just went to the local hardware store and brought several meters of unpainted pine, a saw and mitre, some PVA glue and cut and built up this simple frame, I then painted it a couple of tones darker than the rear wall and away we went.

Under the screen I replaced a dual 3 pin power point with a couple of switches to switch the power for both the monitor and wired to the computers on/off switch as I wanted a quick, physical way that we could turn things on and off very quickly when we were walking out the door.

       

Above you can see the cupboard under the kitchen bench and some of the "still to be tidied up" wiring that I had to run.  The two "additional" holes you can see were for lack of a better term "a complete fu@k up" as there was a beam between them and the wiring I needed to pull thru.  Lets call them "air holes" for now.

       

Above you can see the old prototype computer sitting in the cupboard / server room and the 240v power stuff on the right.

After monitoring the temperater in the cupboard and seeing with the doors closed it rise to over 35 degrees Celsius I installed a 120mm "silent" fan I brought online for $20 from some case modding online store.

Also in these photos you can see the 2TB macpower NAS, Netgear Router, USB TV card, switched and unswitched power feeds and wireless weather station connected to the computer via USB.

The red LED fan, was not by choice, I thought I was ordering a fan that was made of red plastic as it was cheap but that's what arrived.

Bardcode Shopping Lists	Used as Digital Photo Frame
Weather Station Display	Another Weather Screen
Kitchen / Cooking Database	Kitchen Timers
Email / Outlook	Google Maps
In Kitchen	Twitter Scoreboard