[mythtv-users] Touchscreen Myth Frontend

[Dan Hawker]

Hi All,

My first myth post, so please be gentle :)

Am in the preparation stage of building/setting up a wall-mounted, 
touchscreen myth front-end. I decided upon this crazy course of action 
the other day whilst sifting through my loftspace and remembering I had 
a 15" touchscreen LCD display that was sat there doing nothing. As I 
have always quite fancied a touchscreen digital jukebox (like you get in 
pubs here in the UK) and a pvr, I thought now was the chance to couple 
it all together and attempt to get a touchscreen myth frontend working.

Am after some quick advice/experiences (preferably with links to useful 
sites/articles/anecdotes) to help me fulfil the project.

So far, I have a backend (working mostly) and a pile of parts for my 
frontend. My frontend is a Via EPIA EN15000 mobo, 1GB RAM, a wireless 
PCI NIC, CF card IDE adapter incl 1GB card (to boot from) and the screen 
itself. All good so far. I have an old laptop hard drive (6GBish) that I 
can initially develop the system on, before transferring the final 
solution to CF.

My only worries are...
# screen - the screen is a DigiPOS 15" touchscreen LCD (serial driven). 
Allegedly these are rebadged ELO devices, or at least thats the drivers 
they say you can use. Has anyone used one of these beasts before and/or 
had any experience (preferably good) with getting touchscreens working 
with Myth???

# expansion - I'd also like to add a remote to this device (am lazy). 
Unfortunately the touchscreen is serial based and the EPIA has only one 
serial port. It also only has one PCI slot (soon to be populated with a 
wireless card).
Hence the lack of any additional serial ports. The mobo has a CIR port 
on it. Has anyone connected a CIR receiver to a EPIA board, did it work, 
is it compatible with LIRC???  I've seen some dead cheap USB based IR 
remotes (incl receivers) around, but have noticed on the list that these 
are generally useless. Is this correct???  Would it just be easier to 
get one of these???

Thats it for now (tho am sure it won't be the last time I post).

TIA

Dan
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