I built my family a giant touchscreen
For the past few weeks I have been tinkering with a replacement for my old Smart Mirror. As these things tend to do, it got a little out of hand.
The result is Cannvas: a 40-inch portrait touchscreen that acts as a home hub for our family.
Rather than turn this into a monster post, I made a video about the whole thing. It covers the hardware, the mistakes I made along the way and the custom software now running our whiteboard, calendar, chores, todos and other family bits and pieces.
A few build notes
- The touchscreen is just an infrared frame attached to the front of a normal TV. It connects over USB and works as a standard multitouch device in Linux.
- The display runs a React, TypeScript and Vite app inside Chromium's kiosk mode on a Raspberry Pi 5.
- I used the 8GB Pi because I already owned it, not because Cannvas needs that much memory.
- The acrylic protects the TV from enthusiastic little fingers, but if I built it again I would look more closely at using glass or perhaps no protective layer at all.
Bill of materials
These are the prices I paid, or replacement estimates for parts I already owned, in Australian dollars:
| Part | Cost |
|---|---|
| FFALCON FF40S55 40-inch TV | A$279.00 |
| TaiTouch 40-inch IR touch frame, delivered | A$147.06 |
| Bunnings acrylic sheet | A$89.43 |
| LINDEN tilt wall mount | A$69.00 |
| Raspberry Pi 5 8GB setup | A$322.52 |
| USB and power cables and adaptors | A$32.93 |
| Total value of parts used | A$939.94 |
I also spent A$109.90 on a gas-assisted wall mount that turned out to be unsuitable, bringing the all-in project total shown in the video to A$1,049.84. Because I already owned the Pi setup, the actual extra cost excluding that mistake was A$617.42.