Over a year after it began, the whole-house-audio project is complete. 4 rooms around the house can now be filled with the sound of any of (currently) 4 audio devices thanks to a mixture of hardware and software.
One thing that has been lacking since the first build of the rack is ventilation. With both sets of doors closed, the inside can get quite warm, especially when iron is turned on. Not any more though, having just completed the installation of 2 active ventilation zones, lighting and a low voltage power supply system [...]
The audio system that I’m building requires 2 low-power computers: 1 for the touchscreen controller (not using an iPod Touch for the moment) and 1 to act as a webserver and serial-console server. Once again eBay has come to the rescue, and by searching for ‘geode’ – a low-power processor for Thin Clients & Small [...]
I’ve finally gotten around to fixing the top to the rack cabinet. It’s made from the door of an old storage-only cabinet, which was actually a fridge/freezer cabinet from Ikea. The top has been cut into the correct proportions for a while, but has just sat cluttering my floor until now. To allow the many [...]
As part of the Whole-House-Audio system I’m building I’ve been forced to install Windows on one of the thin-clients (more details soon). I started off with Windows 98, but found that it doesn’t support USB optical drives – the thin PC doesn’t have any removable media drives – then tried Windows 2000. Everything started off [...]
The weak-signal problem with the MythTV PVR downstairs has been mostly resolved by replacing the coax cable between the computer and the booster by a wider diameter hand-made one. This has helped greatly with improving the signal although it’s not completely perfect. About 80% of recordings now succeed and are watchable. The remaining failures are [...]