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Re-Task old SmartPhone as a Touch Screen display
#1
Happy New Year fellow Plotters

I was browsing Amazon for a small (5") touch screen to display OpenPlotter/Signal-K sensor data in the saloon on my boat and then I remembered I already had one ... in my desk draw
It is an old unused Samsung mobile phone.
Ive now "re-tasked" the phone to be my chart table sensor display
It was easy once I hit on the idea. Here's how.

1) Install a free Android app (on Google Play Store) called "Fully Kiosk Browser" on the phone. 
2) Connect the phone to the boat WLAN
3) Point the FK browser at the Node-Red dashboard on the RPi and set it as the default/home URL in the browser
    (This app allows the phone to run in kiosk mode ie full screen with no address bar and no screen timeout
     There are loads of useful additional features in the paid version but the free one is adequate to start with)
3) Configure Node-Red dashboard with display pages to suit the phone screen size. 
4) Enable Swipe between pages in the dashboard
5) Disable security on SignalK on the Openplotter RPi so that the display boots straight into the NR dashboard on power-up
6) Stick on a little piece of vinyl sheet to cover the camera, microphone and unnecessary buttons and make it look less like a phone
7) I mounted the display in a plastic frame salvaged from an old picture but if I had a 3D printer I'd print a suitable housing.

Works great, looks good and the best bit is that it cost me  £,€,$ 0.0

Next steps ... 
1) Working on how to power it without an ugly USB cable coming in from the side 
2) I'm going to retire my Vodafone MiFi and set this device up as a Hotspot to act as the boats wireless router/ DHCP server 
3) Work on my wife to allow me to buy a decent 3D printer

   
   
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#2
Hello,
nice project!

A suggestion for power supply, inexpensive and which could fit with 3D printed enclosure and waterproof :
A wireless charging receiver
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003614712864.html


Some questions :
Have you measured power consumption? (will the wireless charging system fully or only partially cover this?)
And is there a simple way to switch on off display?

thanks
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#3
Hi
Its not a very efficient way to display data - the power consumption ranges from 300-500mA but I guess wireless charging might be possible. 
I want my display on all day so I haven't tried turning off the display but its just an Android phone so you can just press the side button to turn it off and its easy to set timeouts to turn the screen if necessary. I think you can also set schedules in the App to control display times
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#4
(2022-02-17, 11:30 AM)affinite Wrote: Hi
Its not a very efficient way to display data - the power consumption ranges from 300-500mA but I guess wireless charging might be possible. 
I want my display on all day so I haven't tried turning off the display but its just an Android phone so you can just press the side button to turn it off and its easy to set timeouts to turn the screen if necessary. I think you can also set schedules in the App to control display times

you could just get a ribbon like micro usb cable like this one:

https://amzn.to/3rV7Jn3

that would get the cable behind where you could root it without seeing it.  make sure you get the one with the slopes on the micro USB the right way around

looks great by the way!
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