Because what else are you going to do in the shower?

This is a small project I did for my better half — I noticed she always had the iPad on full volume when having a shower. As she is busy studying for her masters, that’s about the only time she has to “watch” TV.

I thought I’d make it easier for her by putting a waterproof screen on the wall. My first thought was a waterproof tablet, like the Sony Xperia. However, that would be (a) no fun; (b) expensive; and (c) touchscreens don’t work at all when wet. So I decided to build my own.

For software, I used RasPlex. It fits in well as we have a number of Plex devices in the house already, and it also provides an Airplay sink. So my wife can just send whatever she’s watching on her iPad to the screen on the wall. And the entire thing can be controlled from any mobile device with Plex.

This isn’t a set of instructions or even a build log — like most things, the build was more trial and error than meticulous planning. It’s not difficult if you decide to build your own. That said, I was asked by a couple of people to post details, so here goes…

I ordered nearly all my parts from Taobao (China’s eBay).

• Raspberry Pi Model B (easy, so no link…)
• 10.1″ 1280×800 LCD panel and HDMI->LVDS controller board (there are many to choose from here. The panel is about 2mm thick. Get the controller and screen as a pair, or they might not be compatible. Be careful — most cheap screens are sub-HD 1024×768.).
• An HDMI analog audio extractor (Analog audio from the RPi is poor. This little box is powered from USB and solves the problem. I removed it from its housing and used the bare board.)
• Some sort of sound output. I’m using waterproof in-ceiling speakers with integrated amplifiers.
• A Wi-Fi dongle. (I used a fairly large Atheros-chip Wireless-N dongle that I knew worked well with Linux. Lots of wireless dongles are reputed to work with the Raspberry Pi, but not all work well — you may need to try a few).
• A “UPiS Advanced” Uninterruptible Power Supply
• A power supply. I bought this locally — A 120V/230VAC -> 12V 5A DC power supply. It needs to be able to handle the combined power draw of the screen and all peripherals, so bigger is better.
• Two ABS project boxes — one for the screen, and one waterproof one for the power supply. Get some waterproof wire grommets for the PSU box.
• A sheet of 1mm-thick quartz glass (any glass will do — I chose quartz for its clarity. The thinner and clearer the better the image will be).
• A couple of tiny HDMI cables (I made them smaller still by hacking away insulation. And destroyed two in the process — so get more than you need)..

All of these were from Taobao, with the exception of the UPiS, which I ordered from modmypi.com.

The entire thing is powered from the 12V 5A PSU. This is housed in the waterproof project box and hidden in the ceiling. It can be turned on and off using a spare light switch.

The 12V output from the PSU then feeds through (via waterproof grommets) to the screen — specifically, the LCD module (which requires 12V) and the UPis (which converts 12V to 5V for the rest of the hardware).

I use the UPiS to coordinate graceful shutdown when the light switch is flicked off. It detects the loss of power, but can provide backup power to the Raspberry Pi. Once the power loss is detected, it signals to the Raspbery Pi to shut down. Without this, file corruption could potentially be a problem after thousands of cycles of powering off without shutting down gracefully.

I wrote a small Python script so that the RasPi could query the UPis every few seconds to determine if the power had been cut.

One detail worth noting is that I had to remove the composite and USB ports on the RPi in order to get it to fit. I then directly soldered in wires for my USB devices. This saved a lot of space.

The (almost) finished product

Obviously this is pretty light on details, but I figure that no two builds are likely to be the same here. I tried to make use of what I already had lying around. In the picture above, the RaspPi is in the top left with the UPis on top of it. To the right you can see the UPiS battery. Below this is the LVDS converter board. On the bottom left is the HDMI audio extractor, and on the bottom right is the Wi-Fi dongle.

After plugging in everything and testing, most of the work involved carving up the project box and waterproofing it. To fit everything in, I made standoffs out of “Oogoo” (A silicone / cornflower mix, in my case coloured with blue acrylic paint), but you could also 3D-print them. The inner portion of the project box was already waterproof. Obviously once I had cut out the hole for the screen, this was no longer the case, but I managed to seal it around the front (behind the glass and screen) with a large Oogoo gasket and some 3M mastik tape. This presses the front of the glass to the inside of the ABS box, with a bead of silicone to fill the gaps and make it waterproof.

I chopped the box down thinner, filled gaps, and finished it with some acrylic spray paint and clear coat. And some cutesy stick-on lettering. And, tadaaa…

Ready to watch. Ignore the cutesy name!

However if you’ve got one, its likely getting a bit long in the tooth by now.

Getting BIOS setting errors on each boot up of your eeePC? If it’s asking you to reload setup defaults by pressing F2 every time you turn it on, it’s probably time to replace the CMOS backup battery.

With a hefty disclaimer of me not being responsible for anything you do or don’t do… here’s how:

First buy a replacement battery. It is an ML 1220 3V rechargeable button battery. eBay or Amazon will be your best bets. If you can get one with metal contacts pre-soldered to the battery, it will make your life easier. Don’t get a CR1220 — those are non-rechargeable.

When ready, it’s time to open up the eeePC.

1. Unplug the eeePC and remove the main battery.

2. Turn the netbook upside down and remove the four Philips screws, one in each corner. Unscrew the memory flap on the bottom to find a fifth screw inside. Unscrew that too.

Unscrew the five screws

3. Turn the netbook right-side up and flip open the screen. You need to separate the keyboard from the body. It is held on with small plastic clips along the top side. Use a small plastic spudger tool or (gently) use a small flat-head screwdriver and slide it along the top gap between the keyboard and the body. There are about five clips.

5. Once the clips are released, the keyboard will slide upward. It is still connected near the bottom by a ribbon cable. Gently use a small flat-head screwdriver to flip open the black latch holding the cable to the mainboard, release the cable and remove the keyboard.

Unclip the keyboard ribbon cable

6. Now it’s time to begin removing the top shell of the netbook. Remove the five screws you can see. One is underneath the “Warranty void if broken or removed” sticker. There’s no way your eeePC is still in warranty. (If it were, you should know you can easily buy tamper-resistant “Warranty void if broken” stickers on eBay). Once the screws are removed, gently release the touchpad ribbon cable before going any further. Again, a small flat-head screwdriver prying on each side of the black clip will release it.

Unclip the touchpad ribbon cable

7. Release the top shell by sliding your plastic tool or a small flat-head screwdriver between the two shell halves along the front. Again there are 5 or 6 clips. You only need to go along the front… The entire top half will separate once the clips are released. It will come away since the touchpad cable is disconnected.

8. The battery is on the lower left-hand corner of the mainboard, probably peeping out from behind a wireless module that is taped to the top of the board, just below the big fan. The battery is wrapped in dark green heatshrink plastic, and clips to the mainboard using a white connector.

The eeePC is finally open. The backup battery is hiding on the lower left of the netbook (top of this photo, to the left of the fan).

9. Carefully unstick the wireless module and move it out of the way. Then use small needle-nosed pliers to carefully unplug the white plastic plug connecting the battery. You can cut away the green heatshrink material to expose the battery underneath. If you test the voltage across the battery, you should see significantly less than 3V. Mine was down to under 1V.

The CMOS backup battery with heatshrink

The CMOS backup battery exposed

10. Snip off the black and red wires as close to the battery as possible, and strip and carefully solder them onto the terminal clips of your new battery.

Bear in mind that soldering to lithium batteries isn’t the safest of things you will ever do. Lithium batteries aren’t all that friendly, and can catch fire or explode very violently. If your battery doesn’t have terminals pre-welded to it, if you are cack-handed or only have a cheap non-temperature controlled iron, skip soldering and just use electrical tape. Just be sure to clean the battery thorough and fasten the wire well enough to ensure it won’t move and potentially short out the battery, causing another potentially amusing fire at a later date.

If there are no terminals, solder the wires onto small pieces of broken paperclip coils wound into mini single-turn springs, place these springs on each side of the battery, ensuring they don’t touch or short out the battery, and tape around the battery tightly. The compression should make a good connection.

If yours does have terminals, then go ahead and solder, but use the “heatsink trick”: To sink heat away from the battery when soldering, use needle-nosed pliers to grasp the battery terminal between where you are soldering and the battery. As the metal of the pliers acts as a much larger heat reservoir than the battery, a lot of the heat will travel into the pliers rather than into the battery. Also, solder quickly, wear eye protection, keep your head back and flammable materials away, and use an aforementioned decent temperature-controlled soldering iron. If you, or any part of you or your property, family, friends or pets does decide to go on fire or otherwise get hurt as a result of this article: tough luck, I warned you I would take no responsibility

Make sure you solder or tape the right way round: Red to the + terminal and black to the -.

The new battery, before soldering

After soldering

11. Once soldered or taped, use electrical tape to wrap the battery and terminals, so that no metal parts are exposed. Make sure there is no way the two terminals can ever touch themselves or anything else.

Then clip it back to the mainboard (make sure you clip it the right way round — don’t force it in the wrong way. Mine had a pen mark on the top to show which way was “up”) stick back the wireless module, and reassemble the netbook in reverse order. Be careful when re-seating the ribbon cables — wiggle them left and right to seat them as far as possible before re-engaging the clips with your other hand.

Tadaaa… Done. Extra points if you have an anonymous screw left over after putting it back together.

All small white things are good

You should now no longer have to reload BIOS defaults on every boot. The CMOS backup battery should be good for another three to five years.

There’s not a great deal to write about compatibility, as everything “just worked” out of the box.

The upgrade went well — one of the great things about Linux is how well it takes to a complete brain transplant. No HAL trouble or “repair install” nonsense that you get on Windows.

Here are the things I had to do after the upgrade to get a 100% perfect system…

Digital surround
I use a digital coax conneciton to my AV receiver. This worked right out of the box, with the digital stereo option chosen in volume control -> Sound Preferences -> hardware. However, I was only getting stereo rather than 5-channel sound. To fix this, open: /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base and add:
options snd-hda-intel model=6stack-dig to the end, then restart.

Suspend/Resume

With S3 (Suspend to RAM/STR) enabled in BIOS, I still couldn’t get the system to sleep properly. As it turns out, the problem is due to the USB3 driver. I fixed this with a script that unloaded and reloaded the driver on suspend/resume. Follow these instructions on the Ubuntu Forums for creating this script.

With this change it seems I can pretty much suspend and resume all day, without any ill effects.

The icing on the cake was resuming from suspend with my USB keyboard. By default no USB devices will wake the system — you have to use the power button. To fix this, you first need to find out which bus your USB device is running on. Type lsusb, find your device, and note the bus number.

If, for example, your USB keyboard is running on Bus 5, then you’d use the following command to enable resume:

echo "USB5" > /proc/acpi/wakeup

Add that command to your /etc/rc.local file, before the final “exit 0;”, then log out and in again.

Other than updating my /etc/network/interfaces with a new ethX device (since I use manually-configured static networking), that’s pretty much all I had to do to complete the brain transplant.

A karmic Koala in a seashell

If you do a fresh install of Karmic, everything will work just fine out of the box on the 1005HA. However, a fresh install is complete overkill. As always with Ubuntu — and with most Linux distributions in general — upgrading is easy. Few clicks in the package manager, and away you go.

However, if you followed my guide to installing Jaunty, you’ll have a few old packages kicking around that will cause a few idiosyncrasies. Immediately after the upgrade, I found that wireless was less reliable, particularly after suspend/resume. Also, I found that suspend was not reliable.

The solution is easy: you need to remove some of the things you installed.

You can remove these using Synaptic, or by doing apt-get remove <packagename1> <packagename2> <packagename3> .....

Remove the following:

• Any backports you have installed, in particular linux-backports-modules-jaunty, but that is just a metapackage — check that no linux-backports* are installed. You won’t need any of the new karmic backports either.
• eeepc-tray and eeepc-laptop-dkms or netbook-dkms.

After doing this, restart and make sure all your packages are up to date (use update manager or do sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade.

Then, as the last step, you need to remove all the unneeded packages that were pulled in as dependencies previously. Easy — in a terminal, just type sudo apt-get autoremove. It’ll ask you to confirm, and you should see packages such as dkms being removed.

Finally, restart, and you should be all set

As the 1005HA is pretty new, it has a few odd hardware quirks that won’t be fully supported out of the box until the next release of Ubuntu.

Here I run through what I did to end up with a 100% working install — including all Fn hotkeys. The good news is that it is very easy!

My perfect Ubuntu setup on the 1005HA

If you followed these instructions before, and now want to upgrade to Karmic, see my notes here.

Step 1: Installing Ubuntu

Start off with Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It is designed for netbooks and comes with a customised kernel. Even if you don’t like the special netbook interface, it can be easily reverted to the default Ubuntu look with a single click.

Download it here, and follow the simple instructions here to create an installer on a USB stick.

Power on your netbook, and repeatedly tap F2 to bring up the BIOS configuration.

Under “Boot settings”, disable “Boot Booster”, and hit F10 to save settings. We do this so that we can specify our USB installer as the boot device, and can re-enable it later.

When the machine reboots, hit “Esc” repeatedly to being up the boot menu. Choose the USB key, and away you go.

I wouldn’t bother with the “live preview”, and jump straight into the install.

The Ubuntu install process is straightforward.

Partitioning during install

Partition the disk however you like.

I created separate partitions for / (20gb), /boot (1gb), swap (4gb), bootbooster efi partition (16MB), and /home (the remainder), but how you do it is really up to you. I favour the above partitioning scheme to serve me really well over the years.

I set /home, /boot and / to format as ext4, and found performance to be great.

Don’t forget to create a swap partition of around 2x the amount of RAM if you want hibernation to work!

The EFI partition is for the Asus Boot Booster feature. It needs to be 8MB — I made it 16 just to be sure. At boot time, BIOS information is cached in this little partition so that the power-on self test can be bypassed. It speeds up the boot process by several seconds, which I think is great.

You can leave the EFI that comes pre-created. However, I wanted to blow away all partitions and start from scratch with my own partitioning scheme, so I recreated it. It must be a primary partition. It must be labelled as type “EFI”, which I was not able to do using the installer. See below for instructions on how to set it after the install is completed. Leave this partition unformatted.

Wired networking

After install, the first thing you’ll notice is that ethernet and wireless networking aren’t working. Fortunately, they’re easy to fix.

On a computer with working networking, download this file:

atheros-wired-driver-1005ha-linux

Open the zip file (double-click it), and extract it to the location of your choice. Then, in a terminal, navigate (‘cd’) to the ‘src’ directory of the unpacked files, and type:

make
sudo make install
sudo insmod atl1e.ko


If you receive an error after the first line, and you’re not running Ubuntu Jaunty UNR, ensure you have the linux headers package installed for your kernel — you’ll need to find and download the appropriate .deb and install it. Information is here.

Until Ubuntu Karmic is released, every time you do a kernel update, you will need to re-run the last two steps (preceded by a sudo rmmod atl1e.ko).

You now have ethernet network — so plug yourself in to a network cable and set up wireless…

Wireless networking

This is easy — you just need to install the driver back-ported from the next Ubuntu release.

First, enable the backports repository: Administration > Software Sources > Updates and enable “Unsupported Updates (jaunty-backports)”.

Then, open Synaptic Package Manager, find the package linux-backports-modules-jaunty, and install it.

Getting rid of the Netbook Remix interface

While the netbook remix interface is innovative, I prefer having a desktop and a normal panel with window switcher. To kill the netbook interface, Just go to Preferences > Switch Desktop Mode.

Gnome panels can take up too much space on a netbook screen — you can set them to auto-hide by right-clicking them and choosing Properties. To speed up the auto-hide behaviour, fire up gconf-editor, and navigate to apps > panel > toplevels, and reduce hide_delay and unhde_delay for each panel.

Super Hybrid Engine, Installing an eeePC tray utility, and getting all hotkeys to work

An eeePC tray utility is useful in order to utilise Asus’ so-called “Super Hybrid Engine”, which is really just marketing lingo for adjusting processor speed for different power:performance profiles. It also enables you to switch on/off all the eeePC’s integrated peripherals with a click or two, or using the hotkeys.

After a bit of trial and error, I found that the best tool for the job is “eeepc-tray”. It can be installed from a repository, which means that it will be automatically kept up to date.

Follow these simple instructions to add the statux.org repository.

When done, fire up Synaptic Package Manager, and find and install the packages eeepc-tray and eeepc-laptop-dkms. When done, reboot.

Now, all your hotkeys, apart from Fn+Space, Fn+F3, and the top-left touchpad enable/disable buttons,will be working.

Finishing off: Final hotkeys

First off, we need to make the touchpad addressable by other applications. The safest way to do that is through a rather cumbersome SHMConfig policy XML file.

Create a new plain text file, with the following content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="info.product" string="SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad">
<merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">True</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">synaptics</merge>
</match>
</device>
<device>
<match key="info.linux.driver" string="psmouse">
<merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">True</merge>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>

and save it as /etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi.

Then reboot, or restart X (right-alt – SysRq – k), and the touhpad will now be addressable. When you type, it will briefly disable to prevent accidental mousing.

All we need to do now is enable the outstanding hotkeys. Right-click the eeepc-tray icon, click “Edit Configuration”, and paste the following in the empty file:

#Touchpad control
KEY_TOUCHPAD="00000037"
# Fn + space
KEY_FSB="00000039"


And there you go… all working!

Sound and microphone

The sound works perfectly out of the box. However, the microphone input is set to the microphone jack, rather than the internal mic by default. To change it, open Volume Control, hit Preferences, and enable all the Mic and Input Source options. Then, set the input source to “Int Mic” under the Options tab.

In skype, set your Sound In device to be HDA Intel (hw:Intel, 0). (Sound Out and Ringing should be set to ‘pulse’)

Setting the EFI partition for boot booster

As mentioned above in the partitioning section, for boot booster to work if you removed the default Asus EFI partition during install, you’ll need to set your new 8MB primary partition as type “EFI”. Doing that is simple:

open a terminal, and type sudo fdisk -l to list your partitions. Look for the little Boot Booster partition you set aside. My EFI partition was on device /dev/sda3.

Then, to set the appropriate partition as “EFI”, type sudo sfdisk --change-id /dev/sda 3 ef, replacing “3″ with the device name you found in the previous step (e.g. “2″ for /dev/sda2).

Just be sure you do it to the right partition — back up your data first if you’re unsure!

When you reboot, hit F2, and re-enable boot booster in the BIOS.