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That is pretty cool. Oddly enough something I've been thinking about would be a high dpi "ribbon" screen, something that is perhaps 14 - 16" wide by 3 - 4" tall. To sit just behind my nice mechanical keyboard. That screen would have application specific tool bars with large icons and easy to tweak controls (sliders, buttons, etc). That would allow me to give over my "big" display to the project workspace, whether it was a circuit, MCAD design, or illustration. The "special sauce" being that I could render to it as a screen and it would have multi-touch capable gestures for the controls.

I prototyped some of that with a mimo 10" touchscreen[1] but in my vision touching a control on the 'ribbon' screen doesn't steal the mouse pointer :-). I've been playing lately with some ST Micro 32 bit parts that can drive a display and use BT LE to communicate back to the PC. It may be possible to "download" control panels to the screen and then get the feedback through a BTLE handler rather than trying so somehow hook the event handler of a standard App and have it take control selection events from this screen/non-screen entity.

So if you find a long and narrow high DPI screen, DVI, MPI, or even VGA driven would be ok. And a capacitive touch layer, I'd love to get one of those to play with.

[1] https://www.mimomonitors.com/collections/10-inch-monitors



These exist and they are called "bar type displays" and are usually used for gate information in train terminals.

NEC has a fairly inexpensive one that you can buy on amazon for $675[1]:

Nec Display Multisync X431bt Digital Signage Display

... however the resolution is relatively low - 1920x480

There are others that are in the 4k range but I can't find the link right now ...

[1] http://www.necdisplay.com/p/large-screen-displays/x431bt?typ...


That NEC display is nearly 4 feet long. I am thinking the same width as a full size keyboard so on the order of 15 - 18". 1920 x 480 would be ok for a display that was 18" wide and 4" tall. Although I'd prefer it be 3450 x 768 (192 dpi)


Not sure if you'll make it back to this thread, but I found the other (much more interesting) manufacturer of bar-type displays:

LiteMax and their spanpixel line of panels:

http://www.litemax.com/en/product/category/Spanpixel/22

I see smaller (15 and 19 inch) displays as well as the "smart shelf" displays.

Here is a 3840x536 display @ 43.5", which is the one I am interested in:

http://www.litemax.com/en/product/Spanpixel%204355-INU/40


The Spanpixel ones are exactly what I was looking for! Now to try and figure out how to get them, I see that Avnet is a rep for them so perhaps they will be able to help me out.


They don't look cheap ...

Glad I could help :)


Sure, but if you can make a prototype and develop a kickstarter that goes way over its funding goal, then you can either negotiate a better price, or other manufacturers will come out of the woodwork to serve you because there is a huge overcapacity glut on LCD glass.


Also, not sure if you saw this (I didn't, at first) ... if you look at the top text on:

http://www.litemax.com/en/product/category/Resizing%20LCD/22

it appears that they are cutting up existing LCD panels up to make these screens ...


The new MacBook Pro has something similar to this, except it looks like it's less than 1 inch tall:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/27/return-of-the-mac/


Or even better yet, build it into the keyboard as a set of forward-facing LCD buttons!




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