Flat Panel Monitor Bracket

[Evan]

I had to send my laptop back for a new keyboard since the keys were becoming intermittent. I make enough typos without the keyboard helping out, thank you.

I have my laptop set up on a swivel support on a side table next to my chair in the living room. It's where I do most of my computer work and spend the majority of my time when I take a break from working in the shop or elsewhere.

Since the laptop will be gone for a couple of weeks and I need to free it up anyway for actual portable use for astronomy I decided to bring up one of my systems from my basement computer room. I set it up on a unit constructed from wire rack shelving that I modified to suit the purpose. I used wire rack to try and avoid the flat surface crap collection issue. So far it seems to be working and wife is happy with it.

I decided to use two flat panels, a 15" regular and a 19" wide screen. I have experimented in the past with using the monitor in the vertical potrait orientation and have found it much more suitable for reviewing documentation and most web sites. However, for most photo and multimedia work/editing landscape mode is better. The video card supports either via a single hot key press to change the display to suit so I constructed a special bracket that gives my primary 19" display the ability to be rotated, swiveled, tilted and translated with 5 degrees of freedom.

I hate weak supports for things like this so I made it nice and strong. No sag, droop or looseness and all motions are silky smooth with enough resistance to stay where it is put.
Pics follow.



I was going to wait until spring to anodize the arm but I think I will just finish polish the rest to match the rotating joint I made for the VESA mount point on the monitor. Pretty well all flat panels have a standardized mounting point on the middle of the back that consists of four threaded screw holes in a square that is 2.950" per side. The screws are metric.

[Doc Nickel]

Very nice. What, if anything, locks or holds it in one or the other rotated position? Just friction, or do you have a pin or detent?

One of my plans for this winter is to ditch the old P400 WinME box out in the shop (it's literally just a glorified MP3 player, so speed and capacity have never been an issue) since it's aging and failing, with a fresh XP box. (I have a couple spares.)

If/when I do that, I'll ditch the big 17" CRT, and I was planning on bolting a cheap 17" or 19" LCD to the wall behind the workbench. I'll put the box under the bench and the keyboard on a slide-out tray.

That'll free up at least two square feet of badly-needed workbench.

Problem is, nobody around here carries wall-mount LCD brackets, so I was kind of figuring I'd need to gin one up myself. Don't need the pivots or swingarm, so it'll just be a short stanchion to the wall. Nice to know there's a standard for the mounting pad, I was wondering about that.

Doc.

[Your Old Dog]

Nice setup Evan. I've toyed with the idea myself as both my lcd's have tons of room behind them in there cabinets. I'd like to use that space for CD/DVD storage. Your setup with longer arms would allow me to pull the sets forward and rotate them to get access to the back cabinet area. But I'm still looking for the Aluminum Highway that it appears you have found

[NiftyNev]

Nice to know there's a standard for the mounting pad, I was wondering about that.

This should interest you.

http://www.ergoindemand.com/flatscreen3.htm

Nev

[Evan]

No locks on the rotation. I used a sheet of 1/16 cork gasket material between the aluminum pieces in the rotating joint. That makes for smooth and predictable resistance combined with a nylock nut to maintain the setting.

I forgot to mention that the mounting to the shelf pole is just a piece of 5/8 steel round stock fastened to the end of the aluminum arm via a 3/8" SHCS. I turned down the head of the cap screw to fit within the profile of the 1/2" aluminum. I was going to put thumb screw locks on the joints on the top but it doesn't seem necessary.

[nheng]

I like your idea. Most of the day I sit in front of dual screens with the right hand one mostly .pdf of data sheets. Do you know if Win2k or XP support a rotated screen on the 2nd monitor? I suspect it might mean a new video card too, though. Den

[LastOldDog]

I like your idea. Most of the day I sit in front of dual screens with the right hand one mostly .pdf of data sheets. Do you know if Win2k or XP support a rotated screen on the 2nd monitor? I suspect it might mean a new video card too, though. Den

I am running a recent version of XP on a dual screen video card, NVIDIA w/ 512M onboard ram, this from a Gigabyte P35C-DS3R motherboard, 22" Samsung and a Dell 24". The portrait feature is functional for me.

Lloyd

[Evan]

Rotation has to be a function of the video driver so it will depend on the card. I really like the portrait orientation for viewing documentation. It isn't a new idea to me, the Xerox Star system from 1981 had a permanently portrait orientation monitor. This is what a PDF looks like on my 19" wide screen. The page is just slightly larger than life size, about 10%. For this sort of thing it is ideal.

[LastOldDog]

Rotation has to be a function of the video driver so it will depend on the card. I really like the portrait orientation for viewing documentation. It isn't a new idea to me, the Xerox Star system from 1981 had a permanently portrait orientation monitor. This is what a PDF looks like on my 19" wide screen. The page is just slightly larger than life size, about 10%. For this sort of thing it is ideal.

I remember from the late 70's, a purpose built word processor system had the old green (or amber) dedicated screen portrait presentation.

For my old eyes (entering the forth quarter of my century life experience), this function is very helpful as well as convenient.

Lloyd

[kendall]

excellent idea!

It's been one of the reasons I've held of on getting an LCD monitor, I don't realy care for the wide format for general use, though it seems like good use could be made in some cases, and don't care for the smaller monitors.

I believe all the Nvidia drivers allow for rotation, not sure about ATI or the othes, quit using them when they couldn't write workable drivers, and stuck with Nvidia. I understand ATI is much improved there now, but no first hand experience to fall on.

Ken