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OK, so now that the HTPC has been up and running smoothly for a little while, the biggest annoyance that my wife has voiced is that there is now no clock ANYWHERE in our living room. No more cable box and no more DVD player. The clock in WMC of course is only visible when youre at the menu or guide, and it would be nice to be able to do a quick time check even when the TV is off.
So now, my options Ive thought about just getting a cheap alarm clock and putting it where the cable box used to be. Of course, I also wanted something aesthetically pleasing as well as keeping those shelves clear, and a cheap alarm clock definitely wouldnt help me with either. I used to have one of those Drive Bay Mounted CrystalFontz LCD displays in my old case that was nice for monitoring temps and such, but the problem with them is the only ones they offer with a PC-USB interface are limited to character blocks, and there is a gap between each row of characters. This isnt ideal either because the text would be so small you couldnt read it easily from more than a few feet away at most. They do offer some very nice graphic LCD displays (some even look exactly the same except dont have the gaps between characters), but it seems theyre just not designed to interface with a PC. It may be possible, but it seems it would require designing an intermediate interface board (and interestingly enough, the ones for PC actually come with an interface board already mounted to the back of the display board. Yet they never bothered to design a similar board for the graphics displays? Seems odd
Has anyone else with an HTPC setup thought of a good solution?
TL;DR: I need a clock for the living room; highly prefer a nice, good looking drive-bay mounted solution.
So now, my options Ive thought about just getting a cheap alarm clock and putting it where the cable box used to be. Of course, I also wanted something aesthetically pleasing as well as keeping those shelves clear, and a cheap alarm clock definitely wouldnt help me with either. I used to have one of those Drive Bay Mounted CrystalFontz LCD displays in my old case that was nice for monitoring temps and such, but the problem with them is the only ones they offer with a PC-USB interface are limited to character blocks, and there is a gap between each row of characters. This isnt ideal either because the text would be so small you couldnt read it easily from more than a few feet away at most. They do offer some very nice graphic LCD displays (some even look exactly the same except dont have the gaps between characters), but it seems theyre just not designed to interface with a PC. It may be possible, but it seems it would require designing an intermediate interface board (and interestingly enough, the ones for PC actually come with an interface board already mounted to the back of the display board. Yet they never bothered to design a similar board for the graphics displays? Seems odd
Has anyone else with an HTPC setup thought of a good solution?
TL;DR: I need a clock for the living room; highly prefer a nice, good looking drive-bay mounted solution.
