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 Ubuntu to see if that would help (it didn’t) which brought its own scary moment of the 1TB RAID volume being dead. That too is solved now - the drive letter assignments had changed.

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 a 4 port RS232 serial card to go into boron, because the motherboard only has 1 onboard port which isn’t enough for the UPS, the matrix switcher and probably some other things such as connections to network switches.

The new card shows up fine in lspci, seems to be ok when running setserial -gb, but when trying to send or receive data nothing happens. Thinking it might be a conflict with the onboard port, I went into the BIOS and disabled it. Still nothing. So I swapped the card into another machine and re-enabled the onboard port in boron’s BIOS. Now the onboard port doesn’t work either.

I’m going to contact the manufacturer of the card for some help. But for the onboard port I’m completely stumped. It too shows up in lspci and setserial -gb (though only when running using sudo, which wasn’t necessary before) but any attempts to use the port result in various I/O error messages. I was worried that the new card may have killed the serial communication capabilities of the matrix switcher and the UPS, but I’ve confirmed that at least the matrix switcher still works by connecting it to my test machine, iron.

If anyone thinks they might know what’s getting on, please get in contact via the comments for this post - I would be very greatful for any help.

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 of the installed speakers.

I bought some 2m green cat5 cables off of ebay, but rather than use them as normally intended I cut one of them into two equal lengths.

After removing a length of the outer insulation at the cut ends, I attached 2 phono plugs to one length and a stereo 3.5mm jack to the other (with a little help from wikipedia for the correct pinout of the latter).

A multimeter was used to verify that there weren’t any shorts - wire-wrapping the connections was a little fiddly - before I plugged the cables in for testing.

The length with the phono plugs was connected to the matrix switcher and the RJ45 patch panel, and the other length was attached to the headphone output of a DAB radio in the kitchen and one of the 2 ports in that room.

The successful test is promising for the completion of this project. I have ordered and bid on 2 more sets of speakers for the dining room and kitchen, and the final amplifier will be ordered soon.

The software needs to be written to control the system, but I could probably do most of that in a weekend. A little more hardware in the form of a touchscreen capable low-power computer and an iPod Touch will be required to run the web-based front-end for the software. Then the system should be complete.

Look out for a video demo of the system once I’m happy with it!

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: 4
• Kitchen: 2
• Pantry: 4
• Landing: 2
• Bedroom 1: 4
• Bedroom 3: 2

Despite considering that 24 ports might be a little excessive, I’ve come to realise that 24 ports isn’t quite enough especially when it comes to distributing analogue audio & video over CAT5 (i.e. not as IP data) since at least one port is required for each A/V combination depending on the quality of the signal desired. The living room should probably have 4 more ports, the kitchen could do with at least 2 more and a couple by the front door would come in useful for security purposes.

I’ve learnt a lot from the experience of doing this wiring, such as how to lift floorboards, that lathe & plaster ceilings are extremely fragile and plastering is nowhere near as easy as it looks.

Running the cables before moving in was certainly a good idea. It would have taken me probably another 12 months otherwise to get to this stage. It’s taken a lot more work than I expected, although the overall time is down to being in a lazy, bored and/or apathetic mood most weekends. I’m glad I did it though - the ports have come in useful for the MythTV system, for the family computer and soon enough the whole-house audio system. I’m also using them to trial some IP video cameras.

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.

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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 UK bank account (they are based in Germany).

The first amplifier, for zone 1 (living room), is silver. I was a bit surprised to find that the 2 that I received were in black. I was hoping to get my rack looking tidy by keeping the same look throughout the cabinet. Black goes better with this scheme, but the silver one stands out now. To balance it out I’m hoping to get a silver one next. A note of appology was included with the amps, which includes a 5 euro discount on the next order. I probably won’t be getting the next amp for a while, to keep my budget under control having spent quite a bit on the matrix switcher.

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, the Ubuntu file server and found something that I thought would do the job. Sadly the switcher has a male connector, whereas for a standard serial cable it should be a male connection on each end. So, slightly disappointed, I went ahead and ordered a M-F serial extension from eBay, assuming that this would do the job. This attempt also failed - the matrix switcher would not respond to any of the commands that I thought it should, and nothing was being returned either. After a bit more research in the little documentation that I had I noticed that the switcher requires a cross-over cable AKA a null modem cable.

The next cable I ordered was a M-M cable, so I got an M-F converter at the same time. Success! I now have the ability to control the matrix switcher via the RS232 on boron.

The following weekend I set about writing a prototype of the software to communicate with the switcher. The switcher operates in such a way that state is important, since switching channels requires at least 2 commands and at any time someone can press a button on the front panel to issue any command.

When a button is pressed on the front, a message is sent via the serial port to indicate the action that has taken place. Similarly, when an instruction is sent to the unit over the serial connection a reply is received indicating whether that command succeeded or not. Sometimes the switcher doesn’t notice that it’s been sent an instruction, so to get around that I ended up sending the same message up to 3 times.

The resulting prototype works quite well. I may release the source code at some point.

Here’s a video demonstrating the software and the switcher:

A significant part of the whole-house audio system is the matrix switch that allows any audio input to be listened to on any audio output. I’ve been looking for a suitable switch for several months now (by suitable I mean cheap enough, but still capable). My requirements are that it has 8 inputs, 4 outputs and RS232 support.

Once again, eBay has proven it’s worth and I’ve found something for a lot cheaper than my previous find. It has 8 inputs, 8 outputs, RS232 support and includes composite video switching too. S-video switching would have been nice, but that feature seems to double the price so I’m happy to go with the compromise of composite video.

Of course there’s always a hitch with these low-cost items made in the far-east, and it’s almost always that the websites are absolutely rubbish - crafted to work only in IE, badly structured, lacking any useful technical information and generally broken. Thankfully, Google has come to the rescue and I’ve managed to find the software that controls the VAMS-0808 (IE is required, and the installer doesn’t even open in Vista - works OK in XP though).

I’ve got a Virtual PC with XP installed, just to connect to work’s VPN which until recently didn’t have a Vista client. One of the handy features in Virtual PC is the ability to map COM ports to physical ports, named pipes or a text file. I set COM2 to redirect to a text file, and voila, I now know how the software talks to the switcher.

Communication protocol for the VAMS-0808 (not tested yet)

This is what I’ve figured out so far:

All commands start with a 0 (zero), and are committed with a Windows new-line (\r\n). Some actions require multiple commands in order, for example channel switching. An output channel selection command must precede an input channel selection command.

• 0CO1 - 0CO8: Select output channel 1-8
• 0ALL: Select all output channels
• 0CI1 - 0CI8: Set input channel 1-8 for currently selected output channel
• 0OFF: Disconnect currently selected output channel (input channel 0)
• 0VCS: Subsequent commands switch only video
• 0ACS: Subsequent commands switch only audio
• 0AVS: Subsequent commands switch both audio and video
• 0LOO: Disable hardware lock
• 0LOI: Enable hardware lock

I have no idea if the switch actually returns any status codes since I haven’t got it yet, but hopefully it’ll be on it’s way to me soon!

Edit: 0OFF actually means disconnect the selected channel, not disconnect all channels. Also: woo! It’s arrived! Very speedy delivery indeed.

There are two main wiring routes that are part of my ongoing project to wire up our house for A/V and data distribution - one goes from the bottom of my wardrobe directly down to the room below, and the other goes across a short stretch of the landing and down into the pantry.

Until yesterday, the 4 x speaker and 6 x CAT5 cables going to the pantry were laid under the carpet, then pushed down through a hole in a floodboard and the corresponding hole in the pantry ceiling. The reason for this was simply that it was too much work at the time to run the cables properly, i.e. beneath the floorboards. At the time when I was running the cables, we weren’t living in the house so I only had relatively short visits in which to do the work.

I spent most of yesterday improving the situation by pulling up flooadboards, drilling holes in joists and reaching around in the dirt. All but 2 of the cables that were fed under the carpet are now out of sight under the floorboards of the landing. The remaining 2 cables are CAT5 feeds to bedroom 3, which take a slightly different route to the main runs and are already connected at both ends.

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I’m normally only mildly interested in what comes out of MacWorld, but this time around I’m pretty gripped. I’m now running out of reasons NOT to buy an iPod Touch, thanks to the missing apps from the iPhone now being available through a software update for the iPod Touch. The only reason I have left is that I only bought my first and only iPod about 5 months ago.

The other thing I’m waiting for is an announcement of the release of the SDK for the iPod Touch. This will allow me to develop the iPod Touch remote control as a native application. I’m not sure of the release date of this yet, and I’ve not seen it mentioned in any articles about MacWorld so far. Here’s hoping for it to come soon!