Audio zone 3 is the kitchen. This is one of the rooms that has not been decorated yet, so I can afford to do things without much consideration for any damage to the paintwork and I’m not constrained by the current styling. In the end I opted for some cheap Bose-clone speakers to hang high [...]
There are 4 audio zones in the house, each requiring it’s own amplifier and pair of speakers. I’ve just purchased the last of the amplifiers, which completes the selection of hardware that’s necessary within the cabinet. I took the opportunity to rearrange the order of things in the rack a little to tidy things up.
Thanks to the chip manufacturer of the cheap serial port card, I’ve managed to get some extra serial ports working. If you can’t figure out how to get additional serial ports working, I recommend this guide [ZIP, 792KB] available from the Moschip driver download page. It should be valid for most models of serial cards, [...]
Having put the 4 port serial card back into boron, the onboard port now works again, so I’ll probably continue with developing the software. The expansion card still doesn’t work though, so I’ve ordered a cheap 2-port card from eBay in the hope that a different card will work. Before reinstalling the card I upgraded [...]
Today I started development of the software to control the whole-house audio system. It’s written in C# and based on the MiniHttpd project – a small but powerful implementation of a web server in C#. However, when it came to testing the first bits of code, I’ve envountered a problem. A while ago I bought [...]
I have just successfuly tested transmission of near-line-level audio over the cat5 cables I’ve recently finished installing. The amplifiers and matrix switcher have been installed for a while, but until now I’ve not performed any tests of sending audio from one part of the house to the matrix switcher, through the appropriate amplifier and out [...]
I’ve finally managed to find somewhere to buy stuff to tidy up some of the cabling around the house. A couple of weeks ago I ordered some trunking and a cable tray (which will replace the improvised MDF/timber one I constructed from offcuts) from Minitran.
Last month, as per my schedule of purchases, I bought 2 more amplifiers. These will serve zones 2 (dining room) and 4 (master bedroom). I ordered them from the same place as the first, despite having a rather unpleasant experience with the trader on eBay thanks to their appauling checkout/payment system and problems with their [...]
A new version of MythTV has been released, with some really nice new features such as multiple file stores for recordings and a vastly improved MythWeb interface complete with a Flash-based streaming video player (uses ffmpeg as the transcoding backend). Naturally I’ve installed it already.
As I mentioned last month, I bid on and won an 8×8 AV matrix switcher on eBay. The switcher arrived the Monday following the Saturday that I won it (speediest delivery ever!), so I took it home and plugged it all in. I rummaged around for a serial cable to connect the switcher to boron, [...]