)Anyway, I have also done a few bits to improve other bits in the bongo.
The first was the table. We use the table but have always said how it would be useful to be able to put the table on the end of the kitchen unit (mid conversion) to extend the workspace for cooking. This would put it over the rear chair. I looked into an extra rail kit but they were £37
. So I designed and printed a couple of brackets and found a scrap tube of metal and voila created a rail kit for about 10p. I also made a mount to connect a short tube to, to work as a shorter leg.The second was the TV. We had a drop down TV screen from someone on here a few years ago. TV isn't a big issue and it is used fairly rarely but is handy on long journeys to keep the kids entertained and occasionally in the evenings if the weather is bad to put a film on. However as it was getting a bit old nothing was playing. The DVD drive packed up, the built in speakers never worked properly and crackled occasionally (the sound was linked to the car stereo, so played well out of the car speakers but the crackle was annoying!). The usb port worked but would only play old Avi files, so it took ages to convert anything to a version of Avi that would play.
So I took the screen out and stripped it down. I removed the DVD drive and the speakers. I installed a raspberry pi 2 (that I had spare) and linked it up to the component video input. I linked the sound output direct to the stereo as it was better direct. I fitted an old 320gb laptop hard drive, and linked up an air mouse with built in mini keyboard. I also soldered an old usb cable to the usb port on the side of the screen so I could connect this to the pi. I also wired up an old 12v 2amp USB power module to provide power from the 12v inside the screen. I installed OSMC on the raspberry pi and added a few films to the hard drive. It all works fantastically, the resolution isn't great but I found a skin that had bigger fonts which made it useable. Once it is playing a film though it is more than acceptable.
In a perfect world a pi3 would be better as I could send files wirelessly to it from the house but as it is I can plug a usb drive into the air on the side and copy the files to the now internal HDD.
I added a keyboard shortcut to shutdown the pi as well, so to switch off you press a certain button, wait about 5-10 seconds until it goes off, then I have a master kill switch which knocks off all the power to the screen.
All much neater now, and works so much easier! Total cost was nothing but time, all the bits were old bits from previous projects!
