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Scratch built wall mount touch screen Juke


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We don't have many Juke build threads on AA, so here is my effort.

 

I've always fancied a Juke for the games room and had been collecting bits and pieces to assemble one and sketching out ideas on what to build. I originally planned something that would resemble one of the modern pub style screen based Jukes, I wanted some back lighting with maybe a cutout section of music score with a semi quaver and a few notes that would have colour changing leds behind them. No matter how much sketching I did I couldn't get anything to look even remotely presentable. Acknowledging my lack of artistic ability I settled on a functional yet not completely lacking style square box. Others can judge my success, but I'm happy with the outcome.

 

Probably the more common modern approach is to have a Juke that streams, but I happily surf behind the current technology wave and so was content with stored music and I may use this to stream to the rest of the house. I also had no interest in videos nor karaoke - I just want a music box.

 

I'd played with software on the pc so was pretty happy with the way to proceed on this. There's heaps of programs out there but I wanted to be able to run entirely without keyboard or mouse - I reckon if you build stuff to look dedicated it has to operate as such also. This leaves the build details to be sorted, I wanted wall mount and as slim line as possible. You could probably just mount a tablet on the wall, but most software I saw for this approach was pretty poor - and I like building stuff :)

 

Thanks to the generosity of @pauly540 I had a 19" touch screen so the design is based around this.

 

The software I went with was XP c SP3, SK Jukebox and touch screen drivers.

 

The hardware is an ITX form factor fanless motherboard 1.66 GHz Atom with onboard graphics, sound and network. 2G DDR memory, 60G solid state hdd, 19" Wells Gardener touchscreen and an small car stereo amp. The ss hdd is a fair bit smaller, generates a lot less heat than a spinning hdd and is super fast.

 

The box part is made of 19mm pine, I used dowels to join the corners, when glued in these make really strong joints and the whole thing is pretty heavy. I plan to hang it on the wall.

 

http://i1134.photobucket.com/albums/m605/Pinball_pictures/Juke/IMG_3045_zps1fc1shqs.jpg

 

http://i1134.photobucket.com/albums/m605/Pinball_pictures/Juke/IMG_3046_zps5v99k0ft.jpg

 

 

I knew I wanted to route some profiles into it to soften the look and also to get the screen closer to the front panel.

 

Here's the front panel marked out and starting to cut. I used a piece of 19mm mdf

 

http://i1134.photobucket.com/albums/m605/Pinball_pictures/Juke/IMG_3047_zpsi0s9ysbf.jpg

 

 

The screen looks too set back for me

 

http://i1134.photobucket.com/albums/m605/Pinball_pictures/Juke/IMG_3048_zpsw2na0uok.jpg

 

 

so I put a rounded profile on the front and routed a trench out of the rear - this also allows the screen to mount without interfering with the touch screen

 

http://i1134.photobucket.com/albums/m605/Pinball_pictures/Juke/IMG_3054_zpski5npfp9.jpg

 

http://i1134.photobucket.com/albums/m605/Pinball_pictures/Juke/IMG_3056_zpsggoe1ltw.jpg

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Here's the pc parts getting assembled for a trial

 

http://i1134.photobucket.com/albums/m605/Pinball_pictures/Juke/IMG_3044_zpsni6mokjn.jpg

 

 

my original plan was to use a duocore pc I had around but it looked too deep for what I wanted to achieve - the fan on the processor and the need for a pci graphics card adds a fair bit of height to the profiles - so I went with an ITX mini board.

 

This meant the pc psu cables were a fraction short so I had to "adjust" the cable exit from the psu

 

http://i1134.photobucket.com/albums/m605/Pinball_pictures/Juke/IMG_3051_zps5ia6ijyz.jpg

 

 

It all pretty much fits, but is fairly tight

 

http://i1134.photobucket.com/albums/m605/Pinball_pictures/Juke/IMG_3057_zpssn8bmnsx.jpg

 

 

I started cutting out sections of the frame to allow for a fan - pinched from a power supply, to extract heat out the top - it doesn't seem to run too hot in testing, but best to allow a bit of cooling. The way the fan runs can be adjusted in the bios if it's too loud, but the music should override the fan noise. Also put a vent in the bottom cut from an old pc case, some cut outs for an IEC combined switch, fuse and power inlet, speaker wiring, and an amp which was a $10 ebay special. We're not talking hifi here, but it's in a room full of pinball and drunks.

 

http://i1134.photobucket.com/albums/m605/Pinball_pictures/Juke/IMG_3137_zpsxnybfj13.jpg

 

http://i1134.photobucket.com/albums/m605/Pinball_pictures/Juke/IMG_3080_zps8rpl0omb.jpg

 

 

The screen mounts with a few angle brackets and is a very "snug" fit, but that was the design.

 

http://i1134.photobucket.com/albums/m605/Pinball_pictures/Juke/IMG_3089_zps6imrcwk4.jpg

 

 

With everything proved to fit and the software setup I primed everything

 

http://i1134.photobucket.com/albums/m605/Pinball_pictures/Juke/IMG_3139_zpshnkzdlxg.jpg

 

 

and some semi gloss black for the back part of the main frame

 

http://i1134.photobucket.com/albums/m605/Pinball_pictures/Juke/IMG_3172_zpspnzfrwji.jpg

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  • 1 month later...

I had some bright blue left over so used that for the front panel

 

http://i1134.photobucket.com/albums/m605/Pinball_pictures/Juke/IMG_3173_zpszana6uot.jpg

 

 

I spliced the 5v supply for the amp and screen and left iec inlets for the pc psu and screen / amp psu in case any component failed and then it should be easy to just plug in a replacement.

 

Mounting stuff to the back board is a bit of a pain, I ended up bodging some brackets out of the blanking plates that fill unused slots on deskop pcs and a few cable ties. It's not that pretty, but it functions.

 

http://i1134.photobucket.com/albums/m605/Pinball_pictures/Juke/IMG_3495_zps6xknwqlo.jpg

 

 

It's a fine balance trying to shoehorn all the stuff in and wanting to keep the whole box with as low a profile as possible.

 

I possibly made the cables a bit short, but there really isn't much room, maybe a label on the back warning to open with care! Even in my testing phase it's been all too easy to rip cables off as I open it up.

 

http://i1134.photobucket.com/albums/m605/Pinball_pictures/Juke/IMG_3562_zpsycz4gbts.jpg

 

 

This is the bottom edge of the sealed up finished unit, it's all hidden behind the front blue overhanging edge bit. There's an IEC inlet and switch, speaker wiring terminals, two usb ports, amp controls and pc on / off switch

 

http://i1134.photobucket.com/albums/m605/Pinball_pictures/Juke/IMG_3565_zpsufszslds.jpg

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Maybe simple to you but I see what you have done as clever, love that blue, now, ......won't you take me to......funky town.......do do do do do.....won't you take me to,...

This is another reason why AA is so good, you get to see work that people do that you might normally never see. For me personally, seeing this shows me innovation that otherwise I would never have thought of doing, I would like to but it's out of my skill set, way way out. I admire people on this forum that put themselves out there for criticism, regardless of whether it is positive, negative or constructive. I am looking forward to seeing the final result. Well Done!

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I am retro fitting an all in 1 pc I got that has no powersupply and am looking at mounting one of thesehttp://www.ebay.com.au/itm/DC-12V-24Pin-Pico-ATX-Switch-PSU-Car-Auto-Mini-ITX-High-Power-Supply-Module-160W-/381224691313?hash=item58c2c32671 things for the power

 

Have you got any pictures of what ya doing to your all in one?

 

I have one mounted to the wall but am thinking of making some sort of music jukebox case for it

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  • 6 months later...

My Juke is finished now and mounted on the wall. It's pretty cool and gets lots of use, far more than I would have thought. People who aren't so much into pins enjoy it and seem to find it easy and fun to use. Here's the finished thing.

 

 

http://i1134.photobucket.com/albums/m605/Pinball_pictures/Juke/IMG_4189_zps3mp3wpek.jpg

 

 

It looked a bit plain so I added some music notes onto the front panel. These were hard to do - I ended up grabbing some clip art from the net and resizing it to suit, then I traced it onto contact and made a stencil. Pretty hard to cut out accurately and really hard to get any detail. It took many coats of the orange to get proper coverage and to be frank they don't look that good.

 

It's hard to show it in the games room as there is a window just next to it and this washes out any pictures but here's an attempt.

 

 

http://i1134.photobucket.com/albums/m605/Pinball_pictures/Juke/IMG_4204_zpsuxfayjc1.jpg

 

 

I got some small - maybe 10mm square conduit from bunnings so I could run the power cables and speaker wires up the wall to the unit. This is white so blends into the wall but could be painted to suit. On the floor I have a set of book shelf speakers that came from a council clean up day and they perform well - remarkably well for the price :)

 

I'm still looking for a right angle IEC cable that doesn't cover the on / off switch. This is proving surprisingly hard to locate - most are straight entry or bend the wrong way blocking access to the switch. The straight one hangs below the cab which I don't like.

 

I have some cold cathode tubes that I was thinking of putting on but not sure they are needed and may create rfi noise.

 

Some finishing comments

 

- I used SKJuke V3.00 which is a bit old and wasn't really designed to be used with a touch screen without a fair bit of fiddling. My touchscreen is just seen as a mouse and a touch is a single click. Later versions of SKJuke support touchscreens but take up too much room for the touch buttons so I had to fiddle with settings to use the older version. Basically I set the double click time interval so short that you can't do it - this provides its' own challenged when setting up :) I recently started looking at DWjuke and it might be a good alternate program to try. SKJuke doesn't lend itself to singles collections that well, looks like DWJuke may be better for that.

 

- SKJuke can use mp3 tags, but is a bit sensitive in how they are used. If you get it wrong or more likely get a dodgy tag it takes for ever to create and load the database. I now know significantly more about the various versions of ID3 tagging, but perhaps not enough still. Some tips would be to remove any cover images from inside the tags and perhaps try a read then rewrite of the tags to clean it all up. I used the mp3tag program for this and find ID3V2 tags to be the most trouble free.

 

- Other programs that I found useful were a flac to mp3 converter, a flac cue splitter, an mp3 cutter and joiner and an mp4a to mp3 converter. I found freeware version of most of these. I also use a browser add-on called YTMP3 that takes video from Youtube and converts to mp3 for direct download.

 

- I started thinking a 60G hdd would be enough for heaps of albums, but what I'm finding as that people now seem to rip at incredibly high sample rates so the files get too big - this is an overkill for what I want, but beggars can't be choosers. So far I have about 500 albums which, including the OS and apps, takes up about 45 G.

 

- Depending on where you get your music from it may be that the collection skews to many Greatest Hits albums - maybe not such a bad thing for a games room Juke.

 

- I stuck a mini usb wifi dongle in for music updates and additions and for potential streaming. I set up a shared directory for the mp3s and just use the VNC program for remote access configuration changes. When you add any new music you need to update the SK Juke data base. For large updates I use the usb ports for storage and and keyboard / mouse. These usb ports turned out to be a very good thing to add.

 

- a limitation of Skjuke is there is no elegant way to exit it from the touchscreen. I have a reset button and the bios is set to use this to shut down the pc but it erks me as very inelegant. I'm still mucking around looking for a way to embed a batch or command file into a jpeg so I could just have the last album as a shutdown touch. Any ideas on this, or other solutions, are welcome.

 

Also wouldn't mind a way to quickly and easily enable and disable random track play when no user activity is present. I could do two different start options with different .ini files, but having effectively disabled double click this is challenging.

 

Thanks for reading.

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Looks the good's. I also have a touchscreen juke using SK and the limitations can be frustrating at times, but i have not found anything that comes close in ease of use for inebriated friends.

If you want some albums already sorted for SK as in labelled with art. Let me know :)

I have 5000+ albums

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Nice work Dave!

 

Great result and nice to see this completed.

 

If you're not happy with the painted notes, I imagine craft / scrap booking places would have all sorts of musical style decals which might suit. They may even have drawing stencils for such things.

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Thanks Paul, you're a star, would love to grab it when next we get together. The longer one is just the orientation I'm looking for - it's a minor point as everything works but would be nice to hide the cable exit.

 

A few thing I forgot to add to my last post were SK Juke V3 has an error in the popup keyboard you can use for searching - it's missing the letter R. If you google this there is a fix that involves editing the exe file to put the missing R in place of the extra E.

 

To get around the lack of suitability of SK Juke for singles I created a few pseudo albums with titles like "one hit wonders", "covers", "collaborations", "Bulgarian folksong hits" etc and then they show up collectively under the artist various. This means you don't get "albums" with just one song displaying which makes navigating a pain.

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Cool jukebox. I'm just building a touchscreen jukebox myself and am running SKJukebox v4.01. So far it seems to run well. Apparently there is a small bug that can cause tracks to be skipped, but this can be fixed by changing the exe to run in 98 compatibility mode. Just wondering why people use v3 over the latest release?
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Also I have no need for video.

 

Yet :)

 

I ran SK without video for a long time, but there is something extra about incorporating clips into the albums and having them display on a separate wall mounted TV....

 

Esp some of the 80's and 90's clips

 

I have 5000+ Video Clips, not all on the juke but some of my favourite's are

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To me the V3 screen looks better, cleaner and doesn't take up large amounts of room with touch buttons. Also I have no need for video.

 

hmm... that's weird. I'm pretty sure I am running v4 but it looks identical to your screenshot? Just has the small group of buttons in the bottom right corner.

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  • 6 months later...

Hey Dave, great work. After seeing the final product over the weekend I'm just back tracking to see how all the magic happened :)

 

I was planning something similar with the touch screen I picked up from @pauly540 last month, so you have given me a direction to go in.

As I don't have a spare PC and would have to buy something anyway, I was thinking of using a Minix Neo z64 running Windows instead. I have heard about them but haven't played with one before so it might be a good project to try them on. I will need to do a bit more research on them though before taking the plunge.

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