Gadgetory

alright guys so right now I'm in Virginia visiting my sister-in-law and brother-in-law for that matter its whitey sauces sister who just had a baby so I'm now an uncle we're visiting family and stuff so I'm actually shooting in their house right now which is why I'm in a bedroom that's that's unfamiliar to me I'm I chose this room because the echo is actually not too bad and the Lighting's decent so this is what we're working with today I'm gonna show you guys exactly how I made my own in-flight entertainment center set up whatever you want to call it gee willikers what's that thing in your hand it looks sad and probably doesn't perform well you'll be much happier with the iron claw RGB gaming mouse from Corsair it has a lightweight body and contoured shape that's perfect for palm grips and larger hands an 18,000 dpi optical sensor built to last Omron switches and seven programmable buttons are sure to make this your new favorite pointer click on the link below for more info I've been pretty fed up with the in-flight entertainment screens that most planes have either the video quality sucks or the audio I think the audio is probably the biggest issue it's usually just terrible quality and not loud enough to even overcome the sounds of the plane the touchscreens are usually really finicky and you never really know what you're gonna get with the actual media selection sometimes it's fairly limited so I decided to make my own portable entertainment center and I actually got to test mine out on the plane right here so I'm gonna show you guys exactly how I went about putting it together and how it actually worked out for me on the plane in action it's also worth noting that this was a total unexpected and impromptu idea that I had the night before my flight left the next morning so I had limited time and very limited materials to put this all together so consider this a prototype of sorts a rushed prototype so don't judge me too hard let's take a look at the parts to make this happen for starters we have this portable monitor from you perfect it's a Chinese brand thirteen point three inches which is quite a bit larger than the screens you'll find on most planes and I did it to the kid video on this so if you want to find out more information about it go ahead and check that out but it's IPs you can see that we've got quite a bit of i/o here full-sized HDMI mini DisplayPort USB type-c ones just for power and data the others actually Thunderbolt three supported and you can see here I've actually mounted a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ on the backside of the display it would have been a lot easier if I had an actual case for the Raspberry Pi but again this was the night before and I did not have one so instead I took in the lid of an Altoid box drilled some holes in it and tied the Raspberry Pi to the box that way I could actually have a flat surface that would adhere well to the display using some adhesive velcro pretty simple you can also see I bent down some of the tin right here so we have access to the micro SD card on that's got our operating system on it I also kind of tried to roll the edges there so I don't cut myself from the process of handling it this is what's driving the whole scene it's running the whole show and it's perfectly capable of playing back HD video you can see we've got an HDMI a little HDMI cable coming off of here and I've got a little tie down there for cable management to keep it from flopping around this goes straight into the monitor just like that and then on the other side we have USB there's four USB ports here you can see we've already populated three of them two more dongles one for a mouse one for keyboard and then this is actually a 32 gig USB stick that we have our movies floated on to now originally I tried to use the last USB port to power the monitor which is why I have this little cable management accessory thing that's just stuck on with adhesive but I ended up not needing to use this because the USB port on the Raspberry Pi wasn't enough to actually drive this display so instead we're just gonna power it straight from this five volt 2.4 amp USB AC adapter that's assuming of course that my seat on the plane will actually have an outlet that works and is able to use this in case it doesn't however we have a 20,000 milliamp battery this thing's a total beast this is from easy acts or easy ACC I'm not exactly sure how they pronounce it but it's fantastic little unit I've been using this for a while now it's got four USB ports five volts 2 amp connections and it's even got a little flashlight on there which might actually come in handy on the plane and essentially we have two cables powering the entire setup one end is USB type A and the other ends are USB type-c to drive the monitor and micro USB in order to power the Raspberry Pi you can see I zip-tied both three foot cables together just for ease of use and to keep them a bit more tidy on the plane now I could have just plopped this monitor down on the fold-out tray in front of me but then I would have had to look down the whole time while watching movies and that eventually leads to a lot of neck pain and it's just it's really bad posture it's not very comfortable so I want to get this eye level or as eye level as possible which is why I bought this little car mount it's actually a suction mount you can see that there's a magnet on this side this is from OHL pro by the way but the mount came with a couple magnetic pieces that have adhesive on one side so I just stuck one to the monitor and it's as simple as clicking it like that and then you just stick the suction cup onto the actual entertainment screen of the plane that's assuming of course that your plane has an entertainment screen otherwise this kind of doesn't work but every cross-country flight I've ever taken has had an in-flight display so I wasn't too worried about that but moving on here we have a couple peripherals to control everything this is not a touchscreen so we needed some devices to interface with the OS so we've got this little candy board that I didn't buy specifically for this project I've had this for like years for years and years and it's just a handy little USB mini keyboard obviously you have to use your thumbs to type it's not a full-fledged keyboard and it's got this nice little trackpad that you can use horizontally or vertically most of the time however I'll probably be using this Logitech G 305 wireless mouse which is a fantastic gaming mouse for being Wireless it's it's super quick and responsive enough that we really need it to be it's not like we're gaming on this thing or anything but this mouse is also pretty portable so it's perfect for travel very sharp sensor Omron switches and then finally we've got our headset now I actually initially wanted to bring my QuietComfort twos from Bose the the noise cancelling ones because those are perfect for airplane rides they just cancel out all the plane noise but bluetooth was not working bluetooth wasn't working properly I should say on the Raspberry Pi because it does have built-in Wi-Fi 802 data 11 AC as well as bluetooth but the Bluetooth was just not being very stable with that Bose headset so it just kept connecting and disconnecting so eventually I just got sick of trying since again limited time and went with this guy because it has its own wireless dongle that bypasses all that bluetooth nonsense it's kind of funky because you've got this microphone and stuff it's a little awkward bringing this on a plane but whatever gets the job done so those are all the pieces of our little makeshift entertainment center it looks like there's quite a lot here but it actually fits inside of a small backpack it doesn't take up much more room than an ordinary laptop would and of course this could have all been made much simpler if I just stuck with this suction mount and maybe gotten the tablet that has you know sort of all-inclusive battery source and touch screen and stuff like that but this is way funner this is this is way funnier was definitely a bit more interesting and warranted in actual video Plus this was the first time that I actually had sort of a neat idea on how to use the Raspberry Pi that I got for Christmas last year and this is the very first application that I've ever used it for so I'm kind of excited just to see how it all works out in fact as I mentioned I'm already in Virginia's I have already tested this whole setup ow so let's talk about what worked and what didn't when I finally got in the air by the way if you in case you're wondering I got this through TSA security wine no problem I took this out of the bag and so it was this was all exposed like people around me were like kind of staring at it like what the heck is that things but TSA just kind of briefly glanced at it and moved me along no questions asked like they don't even pull my bag or anything on it could have also been because it was super crowded at LAX that day but yeah that was my experience anyway I didn't have any issues getting this past security so let's talk about how this all performed the suction mount was flawless I mean there was no issues whatsoever holding up or supporting the weight of the monitor and the Raspberry Pi didn't fall down once it felt completely solid and even during some mild turbulence on our flight there was just a very minimal wiggle and I was still able to continue watching my movie without any problems really there is one caveat here and that's the fact that the mount sticks out just a little bit too far you can see there's several inches of a gap between there and it actually put the monitor a little too close to my eyes I actually had to recline my seat in order to watch the movies more comfortably but once that happened it was fine also it's just a little bit more obvious when it's sticking out you know several inches from from the chair in front of you to other other people on the plane and the stewardess so in the future I'd like to actually find a mount that has a shorter arm or at least a thinner mounting mechanism that brings the screen much closer to the seat in front of me also while this part of the mount tilts up and down which is which is nice to have it doesn't really pan all that much it's very limited in that area so if I wanted to do some screen sharing for example cos wifey sauce was sitting next to me during the flight it'd be nice to get a mount that has some decent panning range as well the only problem with that is that you know whoever sitting next to you would have to turn their head in order to see the screen so potentially in the future maybe I'll look for a mounting solution that actually puts the monitor evenly between two seats on a plane now fortunately my seat did have an AC power outlet which is great unfortunately it was a very loose outlet so even the slightest tug on our cables here would actually pull the AC adapter completely out of the socket which of course would kill the power to both our monitor and our Raspberry Pi which is no good which is why our easy ACC battery pack saved the day here it worked beautifully driving both devices and even though it's a little bit large it's very easy to stow it in the pouch in front of you the battery life held up incredibly well also after about 2 hours of continuous video playback I think we only got down to about 75% as in decay by the little charging LEDs so altogether it's looking like you could probably get around eight hours of heavy usage out of this battery which is perfect even for lengthier flights the cables actually worked out pretty well but they could have been a little bit longer I think four feet would have been perfect especially when plugging into the AC outlet that was closer to the floor I think it'd also be kind of cool to get some cable management accessories to actually route these cables neatly around the seat in front of you so that they're not in the way so you can move your tray up and down a bit more easily the Raspberry Pi held up beautifully it ran all of our movies without a hitch I was really happy with the performance there as well as the the performance of our monitor I'm not going to go into too much detail if you guys want to watch the dedicated video on this guy you know where to find it overall this part of the setup worked beautifully and this is kind of the bread and butter of the whole thing so I was really happy about that of course I think there's some room for improvement I need a case for the Raspberry Pi it'll just give me some peace of mind and also I might actually rotate this so that the USB ports are sticking out of the side not sticking out but just flush with the side of the monitor to make them more accessible in case I need to use them on the flight the mouse and candy board were fantastic they each kind of do things that the other one can't this one obviously has the keyboard and this one's just easier to work with if you have the trade down but if the trays up in front of you then you kind of resort to the trackpad which also works just fine I was using VLC player that came pre-installed on our operating system which by the way was the raspbian I'm still I'm a total Raspberry Pi noob so I think it's raspbian OS that had VLC and that's oh we were playing all the movies so there were actually a lot of media control functions through that app that were already programmed to both our mouse and candy board which made the experience a bit more seamless and then finally we had our Corsair Void Pro headset there were no drops our cutouts during the whole flight no interference despite being in a giant metal box in the sky this thing worked flawlessly and while the audio or while the ear cups are definitely not noise isolating you can definitely hear the sounds of the plane the volume gets plenty loud to make that a non-issue so I was really happy about that the only thing here is that we've got this microphone that makes you look like a total dork on a plane but I think the rest of the setup in front of me was already doing a pretty good job of that so this was just icing on the cake so that's pretty much it that's how I put it together and how it all worked for me in the end I'm really impressed with how it worked out considering the fact that it was a very last-minute idea and there's obviously like I mentioned a lot of areas that need improvement but at least it shows pretty good potential for a DIY port of entertainment set up so if you guys like this video hustle like on it before you go also let me know what you think about this setup is it ridiculous I mean yes obviously it's ridiculous but would you ever consider doing something like this I'm actually kind of curious I love this kind of craft so curious to see if you guys feel the same way but thank you guys so much for watching this video I'm gonna get out of here spend some time with family and I'll see you guys very soon