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Make Use Of The 21 Spare iPads You Have Laying Around

6 pointsby rwmcfa1almost 13 years ago

3 comments

jholmanalmost 13 years ago
I don't get it. Why do this with iPads, rather than the old-school way with monitors? Wouldn't that make for easier, cheaper, and higher-value? Unless they really did have 21 iPads lying around the office.<p>Okay, back-of-the-envelope time!<p>21 iPad2s is what, $850? Plus $1k worth of server to drive it? Over $9k, anyway.<p>This whole setup is 5376x3072 resolution, at roughly 23" by 41" of viewable area (at a novel 1.75x aspect ratio).<p>Nine 1920x1024 monitors would give you 5760x3072, at a more traditional 1.78x ratio. Each needs to be 13.56" x 7.75" to get the same physical size, which is to say we're talking about 17" monitors. So let's make it more visually imposing, scale it up 25% to 21" monitors. Those go for $120 each, so that's just over $1000 in monitors. You're gonna need 5 video cards, call it another $1000, and maybe those are going to go into two servers instead of one, so another $2000. At $4000 total, you're ahead at least half the price.<p>If you don't want to scale it up, and you're willing to go slightly lower-res, you can do 4 24" monitors, easily driven by two cards on one server. Lower cost, more-useful hardware, but lower res.<p>More interestingly, with either case you don't have to fight Apple's walled garden, you don't have to worry about weird RF issues or charging, and you've got general-purpose hardware that you can use for developer machines afterwards.<p>So, anyway, now that I've spent WAY too much time on this and should go back to work, here's my TL;DR:<p>Is there any reason at all that this is a good engineering approach to building a video-wall?
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mattalmost 13 years ago
Wow, that's really cool. How big of a screen did it end up being (curious about both inches and pixels)?
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sereginealmost 13 years ago
Awesome! How did you make the physical board that holds all the iPads?
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