Hello everyone!
I want to make LinuxMCE the heart of my new E-Home. However, I am undecided about one vital part of it:
I want to have a wall-mounted touchscreen orbiter (running 24/7) who daylights as an electronic picture frame and also displays a calendar and weather information along with video feed when someone rings the doorbell. This could be done by a secondary no-touchscreen monitor to my core, but I want the ablity to input something, specifically for security access and adding dates to the calendar and items to to-do-lists.
I brainstormed up 3 different solutions (sorted by my preference):
- Non-Orbiter-Solution: A touchscreen monitor like the 21,5" one by Medion, which would cost me around 200 Euro. However, the product description says that touch functionality only works under Windows 7 and I couldn't find enough information about using multitouch interfaces with LinuxMCE (mostly that it works as single touch, if at all). Would this work on one of the outputs of my MacMini 2009 Core (MiniDVI and MiniDisplayPort)?
- Media director solution: An all-in-one computer like the Asus EEE Top 1602. This is the solution I am most confident about being able to make it work, as it is decribed in the wiki and I could just install the orbiter on its native Windows if all else fails. The flipside(s): It has a pricetag of more than 300 Euro and it's a complete computer, which will consume more electricity and produce more heat than just a monitor. It's also harder to save energy by turning it off from time to time, since it needs to boot every time.
- Recycled Laptop solution: I thought of mounting an old Laptop of mine to the wall in 180° open position. The good part: Doesn't cost a cent and the whole touchscreen problem is out of the window. The bad: Only 15" in size, but takes up double the space on the wall. While the input will work 100%, it's just not as comfortable to use as a touchscreen. I'm also not sure about running a Laptop 24/7 :-\
Do you think solution #1 can be pulled off by someone with basic Linux knowledge? Does anyone have experience with any of the solutions?
Thank you for taking the time to read this and thinking about my problem here. :)