For all its worth, that’s about it with a kitchen tv. It plays whatever channels it can receive or what ever DVD you put into the player. But what if the kitchen tv was more than just that. What if the kitchen tv was more interactive. Wouldn’t it be a grate idea to install a LCD touch screen connected through a computer into your kitchen? I did and it works brilliantly.
My first attempt was about 10 years ago when the early LCD screens hit the general market. I installed one into a friend’s house who was remodelling their kitchen at the time and wanted to be able to access their email and check stuff on the internet. Touch screens were not readily available then, so we installed a standard LCD screen so that it was visible all the time and put the keyboard and mouse into a draw below. Because we had a good quality 5 metre monitor lead we were able to put the computer into an adjacent cupboard. We included a tv tuner module in the computer for local tv reception. The system worked very well and I also included MP3 player software which became a great source of continuous music.

Just recently we have replaced the old dated computer and monitor with newer equipment. The monitor is a new 19 inch LCD TFT touch screen and is connected to a new Pentium 4, dual processing computer. The monitor is the same type that they use for point of sales in retail stores. We still used the draw to put the keyboard and mouse into but we hardly use it and if we were installing this from scratch I would have done away with it. The great thing is that most of the programs we use are windows based and menu driven.