Shuttle recently announced their new Media Center based XPC with a G5 chassis and a VFD display. However, our resident guru Naser had some other plans as to what a Media Center XPC should be like. In our opinion, the white chassis on Shuttle’s SB86i is the best looking one by Shuttle and using that particular model with an LCD display instead of a VFD was Naser’s goal.

We started out by checking local stores that deal with audio/video accessories and equipment for cars to find a display and since this was our first attempt at making such an XPC, we decided to buy an average quality LCD panel which ended up costing 450 Dirhams (approx US$ 120/-) . We did find a couple of displays with touch screen but this was more of an experiment at the moment and we wanted to take it one step at a time.

Our goal was to find a 5" display that had a VGA input, however these panels are designed for car usage and don’t exactly come with Molex and DSUB connectors. We settled for one that had two Composite Video inputs & one Audio connection- however, audio wasn’t a concern for us. Composite connections were not that big of a deal since both ATI & NVIDIA have video cards that support VIVO (Video In & Video Out).

The problem we did face was that this display had just one proprietary connector which split into power, audio and video. We only wanted Composite and power connections and this is where a Multimeter is useful. We won't get into details on how to do that in this article but hopefully a more detailed one will be added if there are enough requests.

Once we figured out how to have the LCD connected, we fired it up in a test system and it sure was a joy to see everything work first time around! Our next task was to think which case to use and we realized that and XPC would be a perfect solution since they’re small in size and good on looks. After giving it some thought, we decided on the SB86i which is slightly bigger than most XPCs and in our opinion, is the best looking one from Shuttle.

To refresh your memory, the SB86i is a BTX design based on the Intel 915G chipset. Our immediate concern was the fact that Intel CPUs run a bit on the hotter side nowadays and these display panels also produce heat. What worked out good for us is that the SB86i actually sucks air from the two sides and not the front of the unit and thus our display wouldn’t cause a problem with the air-flow inside the system. Another thing that worked out for us is that the SB86i has plenty of room in the front and enough space behind the front cover to install the LCD without really cutting into anything- not even the optical drive which remains completely functional.

Our next task was to cut the XPC chassis to fit the display and for this we used our trusty old dremel tool. Since the SB86i has a plastic front cover, we found that our cutting tool with its heat was actually melting the chassis on each side of the cut and thus we decided to cut a smaller size than our drawing and use some sanding to smooth things out. While its not as clean of a job as we like, it works and is good enough. We also though of putting a white frame on the edges of the LCD to hide some of the rough edges but that will have to wait for our next more comprehensive project.

As you can see from the picture, we managed to do a reasonable job and cleaned and fitted everything back. We now have a custom SB86i with a 5 inch LCD screen that displays whatever we want it to. We think that it would be a good idea for Shuttle or a third party to sell modified front face plates for this particular model to be used with a 5" or even 7" TFT display.

And now the ultimate question- what do we use the 5” screen for. Certainly we cannot expect to use it as our main desktop screen, but using dual view and Powerstrip, we were able to set a low and comfortable resolution on the LCD screen. We then used Konfabulator to put widgets like time, temperature etc. on it. Other cool uses would be to display news headlines through an RSS feed or show info of a movie like its actors, director, DVD cover etc. while watching the movie on your main screen.

Click here to download an mpeg movie (roughly 3.5MB) playing on our LCD. Excuse the Blair Witch type shaky camera. For questions or comments, click the "Discuss article" link above or here.