The Octo Wall

My research group had 8 identical HD monitors lying around gathering dust, and we were just about to get rid of them when suddenly this assignment came up! Individally these things aren't exactly "big," but when strung together they create a giant wall that is exactly 15,200 pixels wide!

Attempt 1: Constructing the wall by hand.

The idea for this wall was to create a surface that was aware of where people were standing in front of it, rather than just a huge display of an overwhelming amount of information. This meant that I would need to do some prototyping first!

After spending five hours of measuring by hand and hoping to line up each monitor perfectly, I finally got six of them up. Much to my dismay, they were definitely NOT lined up perfectly. It could have ben worse, but there were slight gaps, slight angles, and slight differences in height from the floor. The result was good enough to play with but would definitely need some shop bot attention to be done right.

Detecting proximity was done using an arduino and SHARP proximity sensors.

Attempt 2: Constructing the wall by brain (i.e. using the shop bot).

Oh my gosh that was so much less painful!

To use the shop bot I made an illustrator file to make two four-foot boards with pre-drilled holes for the mounts. The plan was to drill those boards onto the wall and then drill the mounts exactly where they belonged. When doing the printing I did one pass for the holes (first, so they would be lined up properly) and then did a second pass for the full cuts.

Lo and behold, it worked perfectly! The hardest part was lining up the second board once I had the first on there.