Talking with Dell and Aaron, we were thinking how cool it would be to have a room covered with white boards. There is paint that you can put on walls that makes them into a big white board. Then we though what if a person made the walls into rear projection screens that had overlays. What do you think? How would you make it?
Thinking Room
by Johnny McCown
8 Dec 2013
Dell and I have spoken before that it would be cool to have a room that had white boards on all walls, so when you were in the midst of a project you would not have to erase something to make room for additional info. Well yesterday and today, I started to tack up poster boards in my Ham Shack, each one will cover a different chapter of my Private Pilot Manual. Luckily each board is only $.95 at the local craft store. I am placing notes and visual references on each of them to help me study. Though I intend to keep this up until I pass my license, afterward it would be nice to have something that I could save on the computer and jump around between projects.
Talking with Dell and Arron today on the internet, I told them of my current project and brought up our previous discussion about a room full of white boards. I express how I thought it would be cool if the wall of the room were covered with Smart Boards, then Aaron suggested Digital Whiteboards such as the Panasonic UB-8326EW. Looks like a great product for the price. Don’t know if it is multi touch, but I said that I would be a wanted feature; got to keep up with technology.
Then I was thinking what about a room where each wall was an overlay screen, with rear projectors. I have seen huge rear projection screens where it only took about 3-4 feet behind the screen to project the image, mirrors were used to enlarge the image. Once again we would want multi touch, and we could build the overlay. The sensor information from the overlay could go to a Raspberry Pi, then sent to the main computer via Ethernet or could use a microcontroller such as the Arduino. We were thinking rear projection, because like Aaron said, you would not want to stand in front of the projector and block the image. Also, having the projectors in back of the screens could help with dissipating the heat from the projectors.
Please post your ideas. If we were to build this, we would want to bring together different ideas to improve on the concept.