Open Source Smart Home Touchscreen

A stylish smart home project in San Francisco demonstrates an elegant interface for home automation without proprietary parts.

- Peter Monaco

This project is an elegant solution to a tricky problem with the affordable but useful 7-inch Raspberry Pi touchscreen. Peter Monaco’s mission was to create a touchscreen that sat flush to a wall as an interface for home automation without any ugly dangling wires and, as you can see, it has worked beautifully.

Your bezel frame came out really well. You’re obviously experienced with 3D printing – what printer do you use and do you have any advice for others wanting to replicate your project?

I’ve been 3D printing for a little over two years. I have a FlashForge Creator Pro, and use SketchUp for all my design work. I enjoy designing little household items that make life more efficient, like clips to hold the Christmas lights to the banister, a caddy to hold my Wi-Fi access point on the wall, or a clip to fix a broken watch band. For this project, I printed all the parts in PLA, which is my favorite material. These were some of the largest parts I’ve made in PLA, and I did have some problems with them curling at first. I was able to fix the curling by raising the print bed temperature to 50 degrees Celsius. Other settings included a print speed of 70 mm/s and nozzle temperature of 200 degrees Celsius.

The design has produced a sleek smart home touchscreen. What space-saving techniques did you need to employ?