Mike's Realm

Just picked up a Blu-Ray player on sale @ Amazon (Panasonic DMP-BD60) and now not having an HDMI capable receiver is starting to suck.  Swapping cables between Xbox, Bluray and Cable for the PJ really blows.  Looking at some Onkyos but can’t make up my mind.   Having to take into account our Zone 2 audio (patio) makes it a bit more difficult.  The receivers I’m looking at have a limitation of only being able to send non-HDCP audio to Zone 2–therefore I will have to retain an older DVD player for this…going to be running out of room in the media cabinet quickly now.

Just picked this up–
Ken found a pair on Craigslist for $50 each, no hdd’s but x2 2.6ghz dual core procs with 4gb of ram. (DDR2). Working great thus far will be my new Linux Router.
No drive sleds so the case is useless, can’t source them online for a reasonable price will transfer over into one of my 2U or 4U chassis.

PJ Mounted now–
The mount sucks, some cheap junk from flea-bay, having mounted so many projectors in the past using real mounts (using peerless, chief and premier mounts) I should have known better then to use this crap.  It has a ball & socket so you can adjust XYZ, however they all adjust at the same time…mounts by real manufactures have separated the various  XYZ adjustments. I wont’ make the mistake of using a junk mount again…Took me some 15-20min to get it squared away and it’s still slightly off.  I made my own grommet out of some fire retardant nomex, mainly to stop attic debris from falling onto it, and also as a possible fire-stop.  This pic was taken after it had been mounted for awhile, ignore the dirtiness.

Controls–
Harmony 880 for IR, and temporarily using X10 remote for controlling Screen/Sconces.  Can’t wait to get the Insteon to IR stuff setup so I can chuck the X10 controls…

Prepared the INSTEON controls and PJ outlet for the attic.  Also mounted the relay board up in the attic and wired it all up.  Sconces are wired into this as well, programmed them so they ramp up/down.  Made a macro on my USB programmable INSTEON controller so whenever the screen goes up the Sconces ramp on, and when the screen goes down they ramp off.

TV is all wired up and center channel & sub RCA cabling is done.  TV wires look all gummy because the cheap electrical tape that wrapped around the plastic protecting all the connectors and binding the cables together left all the adhesive behind…and I pulled it off early so some insulation came in contact with it.  Will clean it up later on.

Clean speaker wire installs all done.  The mounts I used for the speakers suck–cheap plastic junk, no covers for the screws, ugly as hell… The cool part is I used a very handy tool from LSD (Labor Saving Devices) called a “Wet Noodle”  it’s a flexible bit of thin stiff tubing with a magnet on each end.  It comes with some ball chain attached to a split ring.  The way it works is from the attic you drill a hole through the top plate of the wall frame and drop the ball chain in the hole (split ring prevents the end from falling into the hole) and then drill a hole in the wall where you want to bring the wire out, and you retrieve it using by inserting the Wet Noodle and catching the ball chain on the magnetic tip affix your wire or poly and go back in the attic and pull the ball chain out and you got your wire through.  I was able to drill holes just a bit bigger then the gauge of the speaker wire and pull the speaker wire through using this tool/technique.  Well worth the 22 bucks, will definitely come in handy again.

IR connecting block installed and IR Receiver too.  Receiver went in the vaulted ceiling area since the screen being down would block it’s placement elsewhere.  Doing this again I wouldn’t use an inwall connecting block, it just added more wires traveling from the wall to the media cabinet, had I used the non-in wall version I would simply have a Cat5 cable coming across and that would be it.  This way I have 3 emitter cables traveling across, along with a power cable.

Wired in the HDMI and Component splitters to get output for both TV and PJ.  Super Cheap HDMI splitter, so far no issues.  Component picture really suffers on the PJ pretty sure I need to get a better VGA to component cable.

TV Mounting time!  Only one problem…the 52″ TV if centered on the wall is only going to hit 1 stud when we mount.  No good–quick search online led to a blocking method we could use.  This move about killed the parentals!

Test fitting the bracket, it was very solid.  We quickly realized we made a big mistake though.  We should have saved the drywall we cut out to throw over this, because we didn’t we had to put another layer of plywood over to make everything flush with the surrounding drywall.  Then lots of mud and paint.  This was the only part of the project that sucked.  Knowing we screwed up this bad and not really having a way to fix it easily.  In the end it looks pretty damn good and you have to look very hard behind the TV with a bright light to see the imperfections of our screw up.  Quickly made a few more cuts for the power bridge and the LV mudring and ran the cables the rest of the way.

We tossed the TV up and it looks great (it’s mounted so high up because we have a fake fire place that goes under it)  You can also see how we capped the drywall on the ceiling where the projector screen cuts were made.

Cut the screen opening, I did the first cut my brother did the 2nd.

All done!  We tossed the screen up in the attic and ran some temporary power to test it out that night…Woah was that motivation to get it done!  Learned very quickly that I need to tweak the limit switches quite a bit–way off.

I couldn’t access the limit switches anymore–I had to make a slice in the ceiling to get at them, not a big deal, it’s an easy patch.  I also pulled the wires through and left them directly above in the attic where the TV was going to mount.

More progress–Paint and Wall Sconces all done.

Some more decisions made, Harmony 880 will control the entire system.  Xantech Connecting block & Emitters for IR distribution, Samsung 52″ LCD selected.  Receiver + Speakers will be my dad’s existing gear.

To control the motorized screen and wall sconces INSTEON was selected.  I was going to get the low voltage board for the motorized screen so I could control it via IR, RS-232, etc. but those options all would have cost me over $300.  My electrician buddy Kenneth “Teh Fuckin’ Man” Deli figured out a way to use INSTEON Controls, and a Relay to control the screen.  He also advised me on an IR to INSTEON adapter so my Harmony remote could control everything properly.  Did I mention I <3 DIN Rail???

Screen Testing!  Also set the limit switches were I think they should be…
Installed half the power bridge and cut in the LV mudring.

Setup my ghetto cable pulling rig–Since only one of the cable is on a spool this isn’t straight forward, but most of the cable is very stiff so it spins easily.  Still needed someone tending to this while the pull was going on but it made it a breeze running all the cables at one time.  I didn’t have any poly to use as a leader, so I used a bit of phone wire and staggered all the cable’s connectors so the pull wouldn’t just be a big ass ball of connectors.  Everything is neatly tied up and all connectors are protected as described in the previous post.

So I’ve been wanting a storage system for a few years now. I was thinking just some hardware RAID with some big drives and leave room in the chassis for expansion but after reading article after article saying URE’s will pwn your ass on large arrays during rebuilds I was very skeptic. *Enter ZFS*

ZFS is like the holy grail of storage. Yes software RAID rules…

• Norco RPC-4020
• Two 80GB WD 10K SATA Raptors
• 2 Supermicro
• Other raid controller
• 2GB DDR2
• xyz mobo
• AMD X2 4050+ or some shit

Still need to pickup some data drives, the raptors are for a mirrored OS volume.

When I was younger my parents would take me and my brother out every few weekends to look at model homes.  Me and my brother were always fascinated with dedicated home theater rooms.  My dad always talked about how cool that would be–for his birthday this year we were able to make it happen.

So first it started with they were going to buy a new TV–52″ LCD.  We (my brother and I) convinced them to mount it on the wall.  After that we convinced them to mount all the surround speakers on the wall.  After much talk we got them to agree to have a dual display system–TV & Projector (PJ).  I had a huge motorized screen in the attic a friend of mine got me from his old office building that was being demolished.  We got them to agree to mount this motorized screen on the wall.  Then we took it up a notch and got them to agree to mount it in the attic–hidden screen woohoo.  Somewhere along all this we got them to agree to the components being behind in a media cabinet (IR Distro woohoo).  There were trade offs for getting what we wanted–having to paint the whole @%$% room.  Install and light some wall sconces and a ceiling fan…

I decided to run every possible cable to TV and just DVI (adapted to HDMI) and VGA (adapted to component) to the PJ.  I also ran 3.5mm audio cable for an IR Emitter on the PJ.

Cables:

• x2 HDMI to TV
• 1 Component to TV
• 1 Composite to TV
• 1 S-Video to TV
• 1 Cat5 to TV (Network)
• 1 Cat5 for IR Receiver
• 5 Speaker Wires
• 1 Coaxial (terminated with RCA connectors) for Sub
• 1 HDMI to PJ (DVI->HDMI Adapter)
• 1 VGA to PJ (VGA->Component)
• 2 Romex for Power Bridge & PJ outlet

I had to decide how to terminate the cable–do I run them all onto wall plate jacks–that would be one big ass wall plate.  I got a passthrough/spillout plate–I wrapped the connector ends in stretchy sticky plastic so they wouldn’t get gummed up in the insulation in the attic.  Many people say to run some smurf tube from your PJ and TV to your media cabinet but in my case I didn’t feel it was necessary because I ran every possible cable for my TV and PJ.  Also the attic is easily accessible and easy to work in so I can always add something else.

This is something I’ve been throwing around for a few years–ordered the main components tonight.  Should be ready to start building in a couple of weeks–damn hong kong shipping times.  The controller supports 32 channels, at 500ma each.  Most LED’s are 20ma so that’s 25 LED’s per channel maxed out–but since I’m using RGB LED’s, that’s 3 channels to power even a single RGB LED.  I can make 10 “modules” of 25 led’s each–thats alot of LED’s though.

BoM:

x50 10mm RGB Common Anode LED’s

LED-WIZ 32-port USB Lighting and Output Controller

Some kind of U or h channel steel stock

4 conductor cable–might just use cat5

Resistors, tbd based on psu and number of led’s per module.