RaspberryPi Wall Display: Buildup
It took me forever, BUT I FINISHED PUTTING WALLBERRY TOGETHER!
Aww, thanks Wallberry, you look nice too!
I’m not really experienced at anything hardware related so this part of the project was a particular challenge. Since I don’t have access to a lot of tools or a workshop space I tried as much as possible to use out-of-the-box solutions or hack stuff together from odds and ends around the house.
The easiest solution for the frame was to order a custom frame (I went with a simple wooden one from American Frame), which was surprisingly cheap since I didn’t need the acrylic glass or the mounting board:
American Frame didn’t have an option for cutting matboard as small as I needed (I only needed enough to cover up the screen’s ugly silver bezel where it peaked out from under the frame), so I thought “Michaels is having a 50% sale, why not get some matboard and cut it myself, how hard could that be?”
Oh my god what a pain in the ass, I DO NOT recommend doing this if you huge amount of area to cut out (I have 21x12 inches here) unless you have one of those big professional mat cutters with a backstop. Eventually I got something I could live with:
Aaaand this is the point where I realized that getting matboard with white backing would give me an ugly white boarder around my screen... ugh. But hey, that’s what Sharpies are made for, right? Right.
In retrospect, I should have ditched the matboard idea altogether, covered the half-inch of silver bezel with black electrical tape and called it a day. Live and learn, lol.
Cable Management Is The Worst
Now everything gets to go in the frame, and wow am I reminded that I hate cable management!
I put an extra layer of matboard against the back of the monitor screen as a buffer between it and the other components and used a bunch of (appropriately Halloween-themed!) electrical tape to fasten everything to the back of the screen and frame. Once I know for sure where I want everything to go I’ll find more permanent methods to secure everything, but the tape works great for now and makes it easy to change things if I realize something needs to move.
The raspberry pi is secured to another piece of matboard with plastic zip-ties, which at least makes it really easy to get it out again if I need access to it later.
Ideally I would have found much shorter cables and cut back on some of the mess, but in the spirit of using things around the house I just did my best to keep the ones I had from exploding all over the place.
Probably the most annoying thing is how much extra space is needed by the the monitor’s outward-pointing power and HDMI cable outlets. If you have extra time and money to spend on monitors I’d definitely suggest getting one with outlets oriented parallel to the screen.
I also should have gone with a much deeper frame, at least 2 or 2.5 inches instead of the 1.5 I thought I could get away with. For now I’ve solved the problem of needing some extra depth by sticking some styrofoam blocks on the back as spacers:
I’ll have to invent something classier later. At least there’s a ton of space for air flow and heat dissipation :)
All in all, it looks pretty awesome from the usual vantage point of standing at the whiteboard, so I’m happy with it.
Up Next: Software, Finally!
Wallberry is currently running a vanilla install of MagicMirror2 (which is what you see displayed in the photos above). I really love MM2 so far (super modable and has a GREAT community), but I’ll probably change the look and feel significantly from the intended mirror theme to something more like a traditional wall display. I’m really looking forward to this part!
Thanks for reading! If you’re interested in the post where I tear apart the monitor I used, check it out here.