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Hey everyone,

 I have to admit, I am a little fed up with the "ground stations" available on the market today. First off, good luck seeing most laptops or tablets at all outdoors. Second, good luck modifying or repairing your laptop / tablet. It can be done but its usually a major pain with a good chance of breaking something.

 I used a nanok 910 for the outer case.The techstation features a 10.1 inch display from Pixel Qi. What makes it so special is that it changes from a bright, normal LCD display to a reflective, E-paper like grayscale display, like above, that actually becomes more visible with ambient light. I Combined the screen with a Gigabyte GA-E350n motherboard. for only ~$75 you get a motherboard and embedded AMD E-350D APU with Radeon HD 6310 graphics. Together with 8 GB ram and a 120 GB SSD, There is plenty of power to run mission planner and a USB video frame grabber. All while only drawing about 2.5 amps@ 12v.

The power supply is The M-4ATX from mini-box . It accepts  power from any unregulated 30-6 V dc source. It also provides reverse current and over voltage protection.

For a complete screen solution I used the screen and LVDS driver combo from Adafruit. The driver board gets power from the 12v accessory line coming from the M-4ATX so it is protected as well

You can access different inputs to the screen here. It even has a direct RCA jack for video display.

You can even tell your significant other it is a new media center for the family. It streams 1080p movies!

If that fails Just say "I got it for the kids"

The plan is to provide a simple DIY solution it the form of a kit consisting of the mounting plates, hardware and front panel connectors so you can build one yourself on the cheap. the kits will be somewhere around $50 -$100. You will need to provide:

Mini ITX motherboard/cpu/gpu/ram

SSD

10 inch LCD screen preferably this

12 volt ATX power supply