Wall Mounted Screen Hack

I thought this was a kind of fun and easy hack I did the other afternoon…
I hope the idea can possibly be useful to others.

This is the finished “Weather Information Netbook” mounted on the wall in our living room.
I was told by the Wife I could do this “if there were not cords hanging everywhere”.

Well, they aren’t everywhere…

Seems like old electronic devices reproduce like cockroaches.  Especially since everyone I know buys these things. Then, when they no longer want them, they give them to me.
It is an old Netbook, of which I have many.  The screen has been flipped around and velcroed back to the case.  All mounted to the wall where the old alarm system used to be.  There was already a small hole in this wall, I simply cut the power cord and ran it through that hole.

As you can see with the screen removed, I didn’t really do much to it.  I opened the screen and the system case and re-routed some of the cables.  The hinges for the screen were removed.  Since the keyboard and mouse are no longer accessible, they were disconnected or removed.  The cable for the camera in the lid was also removed.  The small coax for the WiFi needed to be coiled up to keep it from getting caught in the fan, etc…  The hardest part is opening up the case, strong fingernails or a guitar pick help a lot in this department.

Yes, that is literally a drywall screw right through the bottom of the case into the wall.  There is another one under the hard drive.  As a bonus, it covered up all the other holes from that useless old alarm system.

You can also see the “Super Strength” Velcro that holds the screen in place.

Since it is an old netbook, it already had Windows on it.  The “gadgets” are from a program called Rainmeter.  Rainmeter uses “skins” that you can download or make yourself to display various kinds of information in various ways.  It is a wonderful program and free of charge.  This particular unit is also running NTP software, so that the time shown is very accurate.  Since this unit unfortunately had no touchscreen, I use VNC to remote control it if I need to change something.

I am in the process of making another netbook wall mounted screen for my station that will show me: ham radio related solar data, local weather information, current time and date, GMT time and date, DX Cluster spots.  I could display things from my logbook, calendar information (there are Rainmeter skins that will connect to most, if not all email and calendaring systems), or lots of other things.  I can also have it show me real-time system information over the network from my “main” computer (Temps, CPU load, RAM usage, etc).

If you are handy with woodworking or something, you could make a nice case to put the whole thing into and make the installation much cleaner.
You could get really fancy and get a small VGA/USB touchscreen, mount the little motherboard to the back of the screen, re-route the needed cables, break out the 3-D printer and make something really nice.  There are many, many possibilities to re-use these little computers.

I will be happy to provide any more information.  If you have some of these lying around, perhaps you can find new a use for them.  And no, I do not need anymore of them, thanks though!

73

KG6WXC

*UPDATE 24 Feb 2016*
Here is a screen shot of the beginnings of the “Shack Info Screen”, it is much more radio related:

At a glance, I have MUF information from around the world, Space Weather Data, some pretty pictures of Our Star, and the local weather. The system information (“GPU Temp, CPU usage graph, etc) is being passed over the local network from my main computer system. The Time display is not finished yet.