Karaoke Forums

Just trying to see how much it would cost to set up a remote kiosk. It seems that in order to do so, you need the following:

1: A touch screen monitor ($300)
2: An Acer Aspire Revo ($350)
3: A router ($100)
4: Software ($50)

(*prices are ballpark. equipment is what I would personally choose, although I'm open to all suggestions.)

So as you can see, your investment could be around $1000. So now, some questions:

To those who have done this, what was your total investment?
What equipment did you use?
Do you feel it was worth the investment?

and to those contemplating doing it, do you feel it would be worth it.

Actually I've done it for less.

1:Dell Inspirion $50 off of craigslist
2:PCMia wireless card $5 off of craigslist
3:Super Remote Tool from Tricerasoft $24.95

may add a touch screen monitor at a later date.

but my total runs up less that $100.
Haven't gotten to use it yet as I still use Compuhost and the remote tool is best used with Tricerasoft products

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The Line Array Experiment is over. Nothing to see here. Move along.

I use a MSI Touchscreen All-In-One computer ($350), Karaoke Songfinder software ($180) and a Wireless N Router ($29 @ Walmart). Works fine for me. =)

Computers from dumpster. $0.00
No touch screen (hotspots have to be too big and everyone knows how to use a mouse).
Network cables ...scammed.

Net cost. Nothing.

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Okay, who took my pants?

It is rather bad form to follow my own post but I thought I might expand a bit now that I'm sober.

A kiosk is a very simple thing. It is basically a list with a search engine, text search will do fine. The singer selects a song from a list and that song along with the singer's name is transmitted to the hosting computer and how much information is that? Three bytes (assuming no error correction.) The first byte contains the index of the singer list (assuming you have less than 256 singers) and the next two the index number of the song in the list (assuming you have less than 65000 songs). To transmit that tiny amount of information you don't need the huge infrastructure of modern networking protocols. Pretty much smoke signals will do. In short, any piece of junk computer can be a kiosk so the cost is nothing.

Touch screens seem user friendly but I think they are inefficient because the hot spots (the area covered by the finger) has to be twice as large as the biggest finger or you get a crazy amount of errors. A mouse on the the other hand can use an area of only a few pixels. A much better pointing device than a finger.

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Okay, who took my pants?

Huh I did not see this. I think I can authoritatively say I'm the only one here currently using kiosks..

<i>1: A touch screen monitor ($300)
2: An Acer Aspire Revo ($350)
3: A router ($100)
4: Software ($50) </i>

1. Can be had from ebay for less than $80 now
2. Cheaper more powerful is a Dell optiplex280. 2.8 ghz p4 cpu and under $80
3. Sounds good
4. Autokdj (free)

Don't forget, web enabled phones that can connect to wifi, also can act as kiosks (free)

One more thing..

Buy used. Try to keep it as disposable as possible.