Christmas 2020, what to get the woman who has . . . . had a year of disappointment and cancelled plans? This was a hard year, lockdowns, home schooling, home working, self-isolation, fear, sickness, we all had a lot to deal with.
Like a lot of people we had to cancel a foreign holiday which is very minor in terms of what else happened in 2020, but it was still disappointing and especially to Bridget who works so hard and does so much for all of us.
So I had this idea for a hair brained present, something unique, something to replace the foreign holiday, which she could enjoy from the comfort of our very own home.
There is a back story too, we’ve discussed the pros and cons of shooting vertical video a few times, perhaps Bridget was right and she just hadn’t found the right screen yet!
Part 1 – a used 747 window frame, for genuine charm. It cost as much to ship from the Arizona bone yard as it did to buy, but it got one final flight at least.
It came in November, and it looked pretty good! I cleaned it up with a little soap and alcohol rub. It wasn’t perfectly square, I guess the windows at the front and rear of the planes had slight bevels to make them square with the seats at least?
Part 2 – an HP flat screen monitor prepared to sacrifice it’s life for the greater good. I pulled it apart carefully and detached the control panels and the shielding tape so they could be relocated to the sides, making the screen as thin as possible. The thinner the screen could be, the better the illusion of being a real window when it was all mounted on a wall later. I marked out the holes for the buttons and would later drill through the case so there was some ventilation and access to the controls.
Here is the window stacked on top of the screen, seems to work well. I added some padded tape to protect the screen from damage and to get a nice seal.
I took a few measurements and sent it off to somebody who could make a box to mount it all in far better than I ever could, thanks Tim!
You can find hours of videos on YouTube where people have filmed sunsets and interesting terrain out of their window in 4K. With a quick rotation and positioning of the video it was cropped to 1920 x 1080, the right resolution for the screen. The kids helped find a selection they liked for Bridget’s trip, some from space even. Youthful minds get that freedom to come up with unconstrained ideas! We kept the videos oriented as landscape, YouTube doesn’t support vertical video resolutions. It would all work out in the end.
Part 3 is a Google Chromecast hidden inside the box to select videos and cast content from YouTube.
This was the first test, I realised after that the screen is a bit dark here, the top half of the back light had come loose and all was good again after a little push.
And this is what it looked like, the kids provided a single serving style breakfast and Bridget sat back and enjoyed the flight . . .
