One of the things that has been lacking in my bedroom is a TV. I can watch recorded TV programs, DVDs and other videos on my PC, but not at the same time as relaxing on my bed. While I had a week off work I was looking around the Dabs website and ventured across [...]
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.
We recently had our latest electricity bill in, and it was pretty huge. To try to reduce the next bill, reduce the heat output of the cabinet and speed up the network I decided to combine 5 switches into one. Before now all devices in the house have been connected to one of 3 switches: [...]
A recent electricity bill has prompted me to investigate how much power is being used by each device in and around the cabinet in the hope of figuring out what can be replaced to reduce running costs. I’ve had a power monitor from Maplin for a while, but most of the time it’s been monitoring [...]
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 [...]
Today I added the final 4 network points – there are now a total of 24 around the house. The wiring project started about 14 months ago, with the plan to have at least 2 network points in all rooms except the bathroom. The final distribution has ended up as: Living room: 6 Dining room: [...]
I’ve set up a few MRTG config files and some simple shell scripts to graph the available data from my Compaq UPS via Nut. This will give a basic way to monitor the combined power consumption of everything that’s connected to the UPS. Currently this is everything in the rack plus the computer under my [...]