Gadgetory

so I did a video not too long ago featuring a DIY in-flight entertainment system where I actually had a little portable monitor with a Raspberry Pi strapped to it and that was suction mounted to the entertainment screen on the plane seat in front of me and it was a stupid idea I mean for all intents purposes it was very impractical it's like why don't you just get a tablet just get a frickin iPad and call it a done deal I completely agree 100% but little did you guys know that whole project was essentially just preparation for a much bigger project that we're discussing and exploring today which is essentially taking that same idea of a portable monitor but replacing the Raspberry Pi with a windows-based PC creating multiple instances of that set up and then essentially trying to run a LAN party 35,000 feet in the air on an airplane oh god that was like the perfect intro and then the phone goes off good lord hate spam spam sounds really good right now sorry anyway this is probably a dumb idea but it sounds really cool and I'm up for the challenge you know it sounds exciting we're essentially going to try to do a three-person land party myself wifey sauce and crisps we're gonna be on a 13 hour flight to Taipei for Computex 2019 where we'll be doing event coverage so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to try and pull this off now the hardware we chose for this was critical to the missions success because we're dealing with a confined space with limited power options and a number of other factors that we really had to take into consideration before just picking out parts willy-nilly so we each have an Intel nook eight performance G mini PC these things are super powerful for their size I think I've heard Intel say that they're currently the smallest desktop pcs capable of delivering some decent VR experiences and it seems like they have the specs to back it up I mean we've got an Intel Core i7 88 0 9 G 16 gigs of DDR 4 memory along with the Radeon rx Vega em gh graphics processor so yes that is an AMD graphics chip inside of an Intel product and believe it or not it pairs very nicely with the Intel Core i7 chip that's in here there's also a 1 terabyte SSD on board and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Wi-Fi we don't really care about so much for this project but the Bluetooth is going to come in handy as you'll see in a moment now the AC outlets on our aircraft are SPECT at 110 volts with a 100 watt peak that our might exceed underload but hopefully by down clocking the heck out of our CPU and GPU we can get these systems juiced up on the plane this is by far my biggest technical concern of the project so we'll just have to wait and see what happens now as far as monitors go to gamers will be using the same you perfect 13.3 inch 1920 by 1080 IPS display that I featured in my in-flight entertainment video because it's a great panel and if you guys watch my dedicated review on that product you'll understand why the main draw here is Thunderbolt 3 support and since the Intel nook also supports Thunderbolt 3 we can send power and video to the monitor over a single Thunderbolt 3 cable making the whole setup a lot cleaner more seamless it's gonna be awesome unfortunately I wasn't able to secure a third you perfect monitor here in time before a flight which leaves in two days so I had to slum it down to an eye yo-yo monitor which is a cheap Chinese brand kind of like you perfect actually but this display gets its power straight from USB there's no Thunderbolt 3 support so we have to use a standard HDMI cable to get the job done a little less graceful but it should still work out now in order to get these systems connected to each other so we can actually land I picked up a black box 100 megabits per second 5 ports which I like the fact that it's pocket-sized it means it's not going to take up much space it's good for travel but more importantly its USB powered and since all of our AC outlets will already be occupied by the Knux we really needed to find a switch with an alternate power source plus I feel like we're gonna incur a little bit less cable clutter this way too now while we're landing it up in the sky our fingers will be interfacing with the lovely Coolermaster SK 61 mechanical keyboard there's a practically new product from coolermaster it's a 60% keyboard with genuine carry mix low profile switches so it's very thin fits in the backpack easily but also that 60% 10 keyless design makes it relatively narrow as well which is perfect for super thin fold out trays on aircraft carriers like the one will be on the cherry on top is that these are Bluetooth supported so we can connect to our nuts wirelessly that's one less cable we have to worry about the cherry on top of that cherry however is that you can actually charge with a USB type-c cable while you're using the keyboard so you'll essentially never go dark even midway through your flight and how could you the things chock-full of RGB lighting shocker now it's also worth noting that we're each bringing their own Bluetooth headsets so that we can hear the in-game audio and even talk to each other on the plane without disturbing passengers around us the last piece of hardware here is the Logitech G 305 Gaming Mouse this thing is awesome I bring it everywhere is the same Mouse that I used for my in-flight entertainment video it is wireless but I would still use this mouse as a daily it's super fast very low latency and incredibly comfortable I can keep it in my hand for hours on end now then that's a lot of tech that each of us gamers has to worry about finding a space for a tower passenger seat of course we could just throw the Knux on the floor of the plane and proper monitors up on the little fold-out trays in front of us and call it a day but there's just a few too many compromises with that idea the first main issue being safety I mean if you have knucks on the floor with cables running between them someone could easily trip and fall that wouldn't be good also safety of the device itself something that small could easily be stepped on and secondly it's a comfort issue and this is a bit more subjective but at least for me when I'm on a plane I can't stare at a laptop or a tablet that's on my little fold-out tray for very long without getting a bunch of neck strain because I'm looking downward it's such a steep angle because it's so close to me and it just sucks it's definitely no way to game on a PC so because of those various compromises I want to find a better solution and and we have we're gonna emulate the sort of system that we used for the in-flight entertainment setup which is essentially taking the PC and fixing it somehow to the monitor and then taking that two-piece set up and mounting that to the seat in front of us the first step was actually super simple because all three of our monitors feature evasive mounting holes and the Intel MUX actually include a basa mounting bracket so it was a completely seamless integration that took all of 20 seconds to set up securing that bulk of hardware to the seat in front of us wasn't quite as straightforward we basically had to remove the backplate of the nook drilled two holes in it before mounting a cheese plate that contained a bunch of quarter inch and three-eighths inch holes then after reinstalling the backplate we were able to attach a suction mount to the cheese plate using the suction mounts quarter-inch thread at that point we basically had a compact DIY all-in-one desktop PC that could be mounted ilvl on any plane to any passenger seat in front of you with an entertainment screen now bear in mind this is a fairly heavy chunk of hardware I mean with the monitor and the nut combined we have just shy of three pounds of actual weight and so I actually did a 3-hour mounting test with our suction mount to ensure that it would fall down but flight or anything like that and it passed with flying colors there was not an ounce of struggle no signs of instability the suction man actually did a great job as far as setting up the actual land goes it was pretty much as easy as getting all the PCs connected to the switch and then assigning IP addresses to each system before having the host PC create a land match and having the other two systems connect using the hosts IP but with all that said in all of my testing everything ended up working flawlessly after ironed out all the kinks albeit in a controlled environment here on solid ground so the big question now is how did all of this perform 35,000 feet up in the air I have no idea because I haven't tried it yet so let's fast travel I'm gonna fast travel roughly 48 hours into the future to Taiwan so I can tell you all about the experience when I get there I'm good all right I'll see you on the other side okay I'm here in Taiwan on the fourteenth floor my Taiwanese hotel balcony and not so great news the attempt to do a LAN party in the air was a complete flop because the outlets on the plane wouldn't actually power the systems on at all even though the outlets on the plane were rated for the spec that I thought they would be 110 volts 100 watts the amperage is probably the thing that was holding us back in the end we all just kind of looked at each other and after having so much hype built up to make this work it was a very very discouraging moment so after several hours of sobbing silently to myself I finally pulled myself together and thought okay we have one last chance to make this work on the way home albeit we'll be down a gamer because Chris actually has to leave to go back home a day before wifey sauce than I do so the very best we can hope for a two-person LAN party so we put our heads together and thought okay maybe we can track down an AC power bank and we actually happen to find one at the inner pad stores that is from a brand called enter pad the store was located in a local tech shopping centre here in Taipei they actually had three different models available I was looking at the two larger ones that had much higher milliamp hour ratings but the store employee assured me that those would not be allowed on any Taiwanese Airlines so I ended up going with the smaller one the 40k model which is forty thousand two hundred milliamps 120 volt output with a hundred watt continuous output and 120 watt peak brought the battery back home plugged the Nook into it and by golly it booted we got into Windows 10 just fine and we celebrated we laugh we cry but then once we tried launching csgo and we were just about to get into the match for the first time the battery died and clearly we went over the 120 watt peak limitation that the battery had and it completely died killed off the Nook and everything and so we were very sad once again then I remember that the Nook can be overclocked which means it can also be under clocked so I immediately plugged the Nook into the wall jumped into the BIOS down clocked our core i7 to 20 500 megahertz on all cores then jump back into Windows so I could get into AMD Walkman and then down clocked the RX Vega graphics by 43% and that's it our core clock down to around 2 to 300 megahertz under load powered the Nook down plugged it back into the AC power bank booted and then upon the second attempt to launch into csgo we were in and we were still getting well over a hundred FPS in game because csgo is a very demanding in fact we were able to game for a good hour maybe just under an hour before the battery finally died so it's not great for longevity purposes if you're actually trying to game for more than an hour but for the purpose of this video and just to show proof of performance that a LAN party can be done on a plane this was definitely good enough for our needs so we immediately went back to the store to buy a second AC battery bank for wifey sauces system and that brings us to present time where we are here now at least in the context of this video now our flight home doesn't leave for another two days and I don't want to wait that long so I'm gonna fast travel into the future once more in a last-ditch effort to make this now two-person LAN party in the sky a living reality and please by the might of the PC gods let this work ok here we go guys wish us luck alright we're back in LA hey I'm getting really good at snapping thanos would be proud so by golly we did it we actually got the land party working on the way home it is amazing how we were able to pull this off now I have to apologize right up front here that the b-roll footage that we got on the plane isn't the best because there is slight too heavy turbulence at times and the cabin lights were either dim or off during the entire time we were filming so sorry about that picture quality's not the best but still very excited with the end result as expected the battery packs gave us just under an hour of continuous gaming although we discover but the plane outlets actually had no issues recharging them so we could have technically had multiple hour long gaming sessions on the flight with a couple hours of charging time in between our keyboard and mice fit perfectly on the fold of tables and apart from a few brief moments of heavy turbulence that would rattle the monitors and throw off our mouse aim the experience was comfortable enough that if we had continuous power from the plane outlets we could have easily played during the entire flight rest assured I'm already thinking of ways to make our next airborne land party attempt more streamlined in every way and finally winding down here some of you guys might be wondering does this break the current world record for highest elevated land party previously set by myself Paul and a bunch of other tech youtubers several years ago at the peak of Mount Elbert and Colorado some 14,000 feet above sea level I don't know you know it was never really a goal or intent of this project to break any records but I would kind of say yes and no you know technically it's a land party that we hosted at over twice the elevation but it's also relying on an aircraft to get us off solid ground so it's sort of an its own ballpark to be honest it doesn't really make a difference to me I just figured it was worth addressing because people are probably gonna bring it up anyway and it's an interesting topic for discussion if you guys want to share your thoughts on it down below but think that's it that's pretty much it this has been a land party on a friggin plane guys thank you so much for joining us on this wild ride I already know there's gonna be a part two follow-up where we try this again at some point and knowing what we know now I think round two is gonna be exceptionally awesome so thanks for sticking around for that guys toss a like on this video if you enjoyed it get subscribe for more tech stuff coming at you really soon and I will see you all in the next day