A few articles back I talked a little about the Promethean Activboard and our chosen method of hanging it. Promethean supplies these with a kit of parts that include brackets designed to hang the board directly on the wall. Because most of our classrooms already had whiteboard tracks installed, we decided to make a custom track mounting frame for the Activboard instead.
In this picture at the right centre you can see the grey metal hook bracket which is part of the original Activboard kit, as is the grey metal bracket at lower left. The frame hangs on track wheels just as the original whiteboard panels do. The frame uses angle aluminium to reduce flex plus the cross bracing shown. It would be useful to fit a stop on the track itself to prevent having to recalibrate each time the board is slid into place.
This photo shows the Activboard mounted on its frame in a new classroom. It looks only a little different from the normal sliding panel. The cables will be enclosed in spiral tubing called “Easy Wrap” and attached to the wall on the right hand side so that the tubing stretches out and drops back as the board moves on the track.
This picture shows the cable faceplates in their actual mounting situation on a wooden wall. The speaker terminal plate got mounted on a low profile mount block because of the bolts and terminals that would have required additional drilling of the wall, this just saved a bit of work without making it too obtrusive. The main change to the VGA/video connector plate is a clamp to hold the video cable to the plate. I anticipated before that this would prove necessary and so it has. The bolthead that you can see aligned with the mounting hole is where the clamp bolts to the faceplate. Once I had got that in and resoldered the video cable to its socket for the third or fourth time, it all came together very smoothly.
