Saturday 12 November 2011

One TV - Two Rooms

To start off I will give some background on this project. I am designing this for a new flat that my mother has recently purchased. She wanted to install a large TV in the living room and a smaller one in the bedroom. The wall that separates the two rooms is the same wall that both TV’s would hang on. However as the building is being renovated this wall has yet to be built . This obviously left potential for some clever solution! It was decided that we would scrap the smaller TV and rotate the larger TV for use in both rooms. This saves the cost of the smaller TV and also means that in the bedroom position the living room can simply have a large piece of artwork on the wall; perfect when entertaining guests.

The first step for this project was the choice of TV as I did not want to make the mount larger than necessary. We chose the Samsung UE55D8000. With the dimensions of this TV taken from the website I jumped onto cad and roughed out the initial dimensions for the internal box.


Next I bought a bunch of 18mm MDF, a motor and a wheel caster, along with some other odds and ends.

Above is an image of the wheel caster after I have chopped the wheel off it. I am using this caster as a cheap rotational thrust bearing.
The workshop after cutting the initial pieces of MDF.
Assembly of the TV inner frame.
Mapping out the routed slot for the thrust bearing.
After routing.
This is the motor chosen, along side the spindle mount that I welded together. The motor also has a collar that I turned and put a few grub screws into for rotational alignment.
This is the spindle sunken flush with the top of TV holder. After this I drilled holes for four screws around the perimeter of the metal plate and screwed it together.

These two photos are of the first test of the motor turning the centre TV mount. There is also a video of this first test below. Note that I have yet to put in any of the control circuits or stop-out features, so for the time being the stand just spins.