That's Desktertainment!!!

We have a small house with a small living room, and we hope to turn the study (which has our big desk and filing cabinet) into a bedroom.

In the living room already we have a home-theater pc as the basis of our home entertainment - using MythTV on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 64bit, one of the least absurd and most successful of my projects.

Previous projects have left me with a nice little home studio - a good midi keyboard, a midi synth module, a small 8-track mixer, a cheap condenser mic and a pre-amp.  Unfortunately, this is a lot of kit to have in any room and you get a lot of wires and untidiness.

I've designed this solution using Google SketchUp, a free drawing program.  (The price of 'free' in this case is that it is very hard for me to do exact dimensioning, but for sketching its not too bad at all.)  These drawings include components taken from Google's 3d warehouse - my thanks to their creators for distributing them.

It is for use in a few modes, like an old-fashioned 'secretary' desk.  In mode 1a, it is closed, and you sit on the couch and watch TV.  In mode 1b, you prop your laptop up on the angled surface and hook it up to a usb keyboard and optionally, the bigger monitor (only 22", but enough bigger to make a difference). Mode 1b either has a slide out desktop mounted as a drawer in the body, or the whole unit could sit on a nice big expanse of desk if we thought we could keep from cluttering that much space.

In mode 2, you open the lid and slide out the music kit and are free to rock out, practice your piano or painstakingly compose.

I still need to decide exactly where the lid goes, which is a pretty fundamental decision. They could fold forward to become desk space, but strength would be a problem.  They could lift to allow access and then return to position with the keyboard safely far forward.  They could lift and slide back, although the mounting for this would be difficult.

There are some obstacles to the desktertainment unit: I can't do woodwork, this is about a $400 job and will need tools I don't have, and its not clear that the blog wife will tolerate it in any case.