Mailing List Archive: MythTV: Users

Touchscreen Myth Frontend

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danhawker at macunlimited

Sep 7, 2006, 4:36 PM

Post #1 of 5 (1347 views)
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Touchscreen Myth Frontend

Hi All,

My first myth post, so please be gentle :)

Am in the preparation stage of building/setting up a wall-mounted,
touchscreen myth front-end. I decided upon this crazy course of action
the other day whilst sifting through my loftspace and remembering I had
a 15" touchscreen LCD display that was sat there doing nothing. As I
have always quite fancied a touchscreen digital jukebox (like you get in
pubs here in the UK) and a pvr, I thought now was the chance to couple
it all together and attempt to get a touchscreen myth frontend working.

Am after some quick advice/experiences (preferably with links to useful
sites/articles/anecdotes) to help me fulfil the project.

So far, I have a backend (working mostly) and a pile of parts for my
frontend. My frontend is a Via EPIA EN15000 mobo, 1GB RAM, a wireless
PCI NIC, CF card IDE adapter incl 1GB card (to boot from) and the screen
itself. All good so far. I have an old laptop hard drive (6GBish) that I
can initially develop the system on, before transferring the final
solution to CF.

My only worries are...
# screen - the screen is a DigiPOS 15" touchscreen LCD (serial driven).
Allegedly these are rebadged ELO devices, or at least thats the drivers
they say you can use. Has anyone used one of these beasts before and/or
had any experience (preferably good) with getting touchscreens working
with Myth???

# expansion - I'd also like to add a remote to this device (am lazy).
Unfortunately the touchscreen is serial based and the EPIA has only one
serial port. It also only has one PCI slot (soon to be populated with a
wireless card).
Hence the lack of any additional serial ports. The mobo has a CIR port
on it. Has anyone connected a CIR receiver to a EPIA board, did it work,
is it compatible with LIRC??? I've seen some dead cheap USB based IR
remotes (incl receivers) around, but have noticed on the list that these
are generally useless. Is this correct??? Would it just be easier to
get one of these???

Thats it for now (tho am sure it won't be the last time I post).

TIA

Dan
--
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pebender at san

Sep 7, 2006, 5:26 PM

Post #2 of 5 (1292 views)
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Re: Touchscreen Myth Frontend [In reply to]

Dan Hawker wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> My only worries are...
> # screen - the screen is a DigiPOS 15" touchscreen LCD (serial driven).
> Allegedly these are rebadged ELO devices, or at least thats the drivers
> they say you can use. Has anyone used one of these beasts before and/or
> had any experience (preferably good) with getting touchscreens working
> with Myth???

MythTV 0.20 adds mouse support for menus. Until you have that, I doubt
that you will be able to get a touchscreen working very well. I tried
ith with MythTV 0.17 without any luck, so I put it on the shelf an
waited for mouse support. I plan to try it again with MythTV 0.20.

> # expansion - I'd also like to add a remote to this device (am lazy).
> Unfortunately the touchscreen is serial based and the EPIA has only one
> serial port. It also only has one PCI slot (soon to be populated with a
> wireless card).
> Hence the lack of any additional serial ports. The mobo has a CIR port
> on it. Has anyone connected a CIR receiver to a EPIA board, did it work,
> is it compatible with LIRC??? I've seen some dead cheap USB based IR
> remotes (incl receivers) around, but have noticed on the list that these
> are generally useless. Is this correct??? Would it just be easier to
> get one of these???

If it does not need to be dead cheap, you might consider a MCE remote. I
use them with my Myth frontends and they work well. Besides, there is
somthing fun about using Microsoft branded hardware in a completely FOSS
system.
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rmbzzz at gmail

Sep 7, 2006, 5:58 PM

Post #3 of 5 (1291 views)
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Re: Touchscreen Myth Frontend [In reply to]

> Hence the lack of any additional serial ports. The mobo has a CIR port
> on it. Has anyone connected a CIR receiver to a EPIA board, did it work,
> is it compatible with LIRC??? I've seen some dead cheap USB based IR
> remotes (incl receivers) around, but have noticed on the list that these
> are generally useless. Is this correct??? Would it just be easier to
> get one of these???
>

I use a Streamzap remote which comes with a USB IR receiver.
It is well supported by lirc and works. The cost is US$30 at
amazon.

The one drawback is that it does not have a lot of buttons.
Thus, you may find that you cannot access all the features
you want from the remote. This has the benefit that
I can remember what each button does.
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stephen.boddy at btinternet

Sep 7, 2006, 6:26 PM

Post #4 of 5 (1329 views)
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Re: Touchscreen Myth Frontend [In reply to]

On Friday 08 September 2006 00:36, Dan Hawker wrote:
> <snip>

Personally, having greasy finger prints all over the program/video/dvd/picture
I'm trying to view would distract the hell out of me.

--
Steve Boddy
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chris at cpr

Sep 7, 2006, 11:54 PM

Post #5 of 5 (1264 views)
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Re: Touchscreen Myth Frontend [In reply to]

On Fri, Sep 08, 2006 at 02:26:22AM +0100, Stephen Boddy wrote:
> On Friday 08 September 2006 00:36, Dan Hawker wrote:
> > <snip>
>
> Personally, having greasy finger prints all over the program/video/dvd/picture
> I'm trying to view would distract the hell out of me.

I use a lot of touch-screen equipment at work, and greasy fingers
is the least of the problems. The main things that would keep me
away from touch is their tendency to drift (the older they get the
faster they go out of alignment - we have some NEC 20" displays
that need realignment almost every day) and the fact that the touch
film is extremely glossy. Contrary to popular belief, LCD displays
also suffer from burn-in (in some cases worse than CRTs) and that
can be much more distracting than fingerprints.

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