For while now I've been wanting to mount my tablet on my wall so that it could show me status of my servers among other various feeds and news. But seeing as I take my tablet to work quite often for pandora, I didn't want to leave it stuck up on the wall somewhere.

So instead I bought a beaglebone black, as per Jonimus' recommendation over a raspi since it has more power. Since I had a spare TV, well it was in my room for watching movies and crappy basic cable, but I decided to re-purpose it to the wall in my living room.

I mounted the board on the back of the TV with some spare motherboard mounts and some careful drilling. It's not quite 100% done since I'm lacking a tiny usb hub so mount on the back of the tv so I can have multiple USB devices running off of it.

The main reason why I want to mount this on my wall is since my second computer monitor died, it would be nice to have a spot to have a few SSH sessions running to monitor my various machines, and to give me RSS updates and weather. While tying this post its currently updating the OS on the board, but it works! Its currently running Angstrom since it was the easiest to get up and running, however I might switch to Debian or arch later on depending on what I all decide to do in the future with this.
Here are a few photos of it, along with a imgur album link to all the pictures.
(please ignore the Ethernet and USB cable you see, its not permanent!)






Link to the full album
(please ignore my messy apartment, my friends tend to leave a mess after they come over )

VESA mounts.

I've toyed with the idea of connecting a display to one of my always-on machines to show various diagnostics, ongoing data streams (such as RSS), etc, but can never really be bothered to figure out an easy software solution. I'll be interested to see what you end up doing in software, particularly if it's fully automated.

Honestly I don't even know what I'm going to do for software yet, but once i figure it out i'll let you know. I'll be keeping this updated especially once I get the mini USB hub from amazon. If anyone has ideas software wise, I'm open for suggestions!

I'm not entirely sure of when it was initially implemented, but I experimented with feed reading in feed-accelerator (in particular, see the uzbl output mode).

If you need a simple way to monitor a whole bunch of servers, I recommend taking a look at my SysMon 1.0 tool. I actually have a greatly improved version that ditches some of the old code in there for Python; I should pull it off of the development servers at school and update the version in the Cemetech archives. At any rate, this is a superb idea for this new board; congrats! Do you have any plans for doing more hardware-oriented interfacing to the Beaglebone Black, or are you satisfied using it more or less as a computer for the foreseeable future?

That looks nifty, I might have to use that!




I did actually think about using sysmon, I will only be monitoring about 3-4 servers though. But I still think it will come quite in handy. As for now its just going to be a small computer, I don't have a bunch of spare time and money to build things with is sadly . However I did find my arduino uno while looking for the mounts for the beagleboard, so I might mess with that sometime. An idea would be a motion sensor to kick on the TV when I walk by it in the morning to show me the news and RSS feeds.

Thought I would share a few updates on my end.

1) Ditched the broken POS angstrom that was running on it for arch arm!

2) Arch Arm is installed, however I'm having issues with getting X to start. I went with xfce and lxdm for the lightweight factor. However it seems in my random attempts to make startx work I've come quite close to filling the 2gb internal storage, yikes.
EDIT: "pacman -S xf86-video-fbdev" was the correct video driver, it seems lack of sleep really got to me today.

3) I got a proper mini usb hub attached to the TV now.


As always, the LAN cable is not permanent, just easier to use LAN right now than trying to use wifi or find other ways to load up packages I need.

4) I got a small keyboard with a trackpad for fun because I liked the color and I figured a mini computer mounted to a wall deserved its own mini wireless keyboard.

Link to the keyboard on amazon.

Other than that I have not decided what software to use for displaying rss and weather, currently I'm more concerned about just getting to a desktop. Once that's done I'll figure the rest out. I also plan on running a quake3 server just for fun since I got bored last night after (finally) getting arch to install and was looking up stuff you could do with a raspi, I might end up copying some ideas.

Back with an update of sorts!

Shortly after I posted last I ditched the BBB for a raspi (the original model). Yes it is a little less powerful than the BBB, but I went with it due to the community and the abundance of tutorials and stuff that works right away with it, basically ease of use for most things I want to do. The original idea was to just have it display server stats or really anything that the rpi could handle that I wanted to see. That Idea hasnt really changed much, but the way I'm hoping to go about doing it has. I recently stumbled across this magic mirror blog post and it really caught my interest at the time. I like the idea of when I'm getting ready in the morning, or coming home from work at night and having things I want to see right there for me. Once I looked more into the project and the cost of the 2 way mirror I decided to not do this right now, well, at least not the mirror part anyways.

Since the TV still has the wall mount and everything I figured I'll just mount it somewhere, or place it somewhere everyone can see it, but it's not in the way. With my current living situation I won't be mounting it to a wall, but once I move again I probably will. Since the blog post about the mirror was nice enough to include all the code he used to make the webpages I decided I would try to use that as my base display, which works really good minus the fact I don't know much PHP,CSS or javascript which is pretty much all it is, but oh well I guess this will also be part of the learning experience on how to make web pages display things I want and make them look halfway decent. While reading more about the mirror idea I found a reddit thread with someone else who made one, and one of the comments about using NFC tags or any phone that supports NFC and a reader to display information that said person wants to see when they put their tag by it. Inspired by this I went ahead and bought a PN532 NFC/RFID controller breakout board and put it together and tried to follow this tutorial, but even with everything hooked up and installed I couldnt get it to do anything, and it errored when trying the example of reading the mifare cards. I went ahead and followed this guide on libnfc and got it to work! It reads the cards I bought using the examble script in the tutorial. However it stopped at the example, which is a little sad. After this I realised I've hit another roadblock as I don't know how to write to the cards at all, so if anyone could point me in a direction of a tutorial on how to write to mifare classic cards, and really any of the tags adafruit sells, that would be great.

The goal of this is to have a tag/card/keychain programmed to a certain person, or I guess I could have a script just check card ID's and have each ID specify a person. What I want it to do is once a tag is scanned it changes the webpage to a specific one that displays personalized information that said person wants to see, and can change depending on the time of day, even have it play music or other media along with displaying what they might want to see. Hopefully that makes sense the way I put it.
Another thing that went wrong during all this is the fact that I think my SD card is dying, that or the rpi is failing as I've had random IO issues and sometimes it wont reboot or boot at all for some reason. I'm currently making another rasbian card and backing everything up as I type this just to test it out and be safe, but it does work randomly and as long as I don't bump it too much.

Here are some photos of my current "set up" which is more of a mess than anything, but I'm happy I was even able to get this to work and have progress of any sort.


And my slighly rust soldering skills:


Album with other random pictures of the stuff I gothere.

Quite a subtle setting. I bought a tv mount bracket at crazysales for installing my monitor last year. I chose one with wide range adjustment of angles. As the walls of the cabinet are fairly thick, weight wasn't too much of an issue so I made a screw-in bracket thingy out of some corner section and zintec I had lying around...Remains to be seen whether or not the whole thing will be a bit front heavy but maybe the bottom shelf can house the big cookbooks from now on!