Ok.. So, I'm almost done with this thing... Sorry if I haven't kept as detailed a log of the build as I did with ramanPi... but there really aren't enough hours...

When it is done fully.. I will post instructions, pictures, schematics, and everything...

This project has been more of a means to an end for me than something I really wanted to polish off and make super nice... I didn't have the time to spend on it to do that.. But it is functional and gets the job done..and leaves a lot of room for improvement..which I will probably do in the future.......

I ended up skipping the touch screen because the US Post Office cannot seem to do their job to save a squirrel... I swear half of my eBay purchases are sold off the back of a truck somewhere across the street from the post office...

Anyway, I settled on a pretty cool solution anyway... and I'll post some shots of it when I get them uploaded... It's an 8 digit/8 key 7 segment display board (from eBay of course)... Works great.. since I settled on using an arduino here.................there actually was a pretty good library for it... kinda fun to play with actually...

The interface is a menu with a clock, countdown timer, duration settings, brightness for all four banks individually, start delay, alarm setting, auto shutoff when done..... will have fan control, and possibly some wifi or ethernet stuff since I'm lazy and would like to monitor it from my desk without walking across my lab... ;)

I'll warn too that my source code is sloppy since I didn't spend the time to clean it up or anything.. but it works..so there ya go...

If there's more interest in this project, I might make more effort and get everything cleaned up and everything....

Here's some pictures....