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Archive for March 11th, 2008

Projects I want to do

March 11th, 2008

It’s fair to say there are a number of projects I want to do ggua year and I intend to post about each of them as I do them.

cctv: I want to be able to remotely monitor the house while we are away from home. By that I mean being able to monitor the front door and have it capture the face of all visitors. I also want it to alert on approach to the house.

Media Center setup: I want to change the setup so that the current MC box becommes a WHS box. We’ll buy a new PC which will becomme the media center. In the master bedroom I want to have a v2 extender, or possibly an X360. In the kitchen I want a squeezebox to pull music down from the WHS.

The Phone: I’m currently thinking about upgrading to the Touch Plus on T-mobile, unless Orange an beat the deal! I’ll be moving to a normal data package, so I’ll be able to use it to blog during the day, to check the home cctv and setup and anything else good.

Home automation: I want the lounge to be on IR remote control from the Harmony remote. I want the rest of the house to be on HomeEasy and for all that gear to be controlled by the Media Center! Need to work out a way to control the loung on that…perhaps I should re think the IR control in the lounge?

Security: I want an alarm for the house that notifies us about all sorts of household alerts, doors / windows left open, smoke, motion etc. I also want some of the house lights to turn on on approach to the house.

I think thats all the tech projects covered…they may be changed a little with our trip to Seattle in May.

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Posted in Cool geek stuff, Home automation, Media Center, Mobile, Windows Mobile

Media Center – The Hardware

March 11th, 2008

Well I’ve already posted about my software setup, but just what do I use in hardware terms on my Media Center Rig?

The Basics
The basic PC is actually quite old, I bought it to replace something stole during a break in over 4 years ago! It’s a Compaq Presario 6000. It’s got an AMD Athlon 2100 XP in it and an NVidia MoBo. It’s been a very sound box over the years. It’s currently got 1.25gb of RAM, I think it’s PC2300, from memory. And a 40gb Hard Drive…wooooo. It’s got a basic graphics card.

What makes it a Media Center or HTPC?
That’s where the hardware gets mildly more interesting. I’ve also got a 300gb HDD in it. Simply put it’s partitioned into two, a 60gb partition used for recorded TV and the remainder for “media”, be that music, Archived TV, Archived DVDs, or photos.

The next important addition is the tuners. I have two, both over USB2. I have a Hauppage USB2 DVB-T Diversity Stick, which has the potential to be great but doesn’t work that well for me, it’s a dual tuner stick with Diversity (that’s two aerials to give a better quality signal). It should work as dual tuner, but as soon as I do that it starts to conflict with my Media Center IR blaster (bean bag). The second is a Hauppage USB2 DVB-T unit. This unit’s great, its the rock of the system, I wish I had two.

Next is that bean bag thing. That came with the Hauppage USB2 DVB-T unit as it was an MCE unit, does what it says on the tin. Which leads me on to the remote…which is quite cool.

The remote is a Logitech Harmony 525, highly recommended. Its programmed over USB from some really cool Logitech software. I love this thing, but I want the top end version…other things to buy first!

To enable the USB I’ve got a USB2 card, I had to shop around and find one with an ALi chip set, I had a VIA chip set card and it SUCKED!!!

Sound comes courtesy of a X-Fi Audio card and some Altec Lancing Speakers. Currently in a cut down 5.1 setup – no back speakers. Again I’m not happy with the support of this card, it’s OEM but come on Creative are usually quite good, support on Vista has sucked and it doesn’t do half of what it should.

Finally there is the Tesco Value Webcam. See this post for what it does. Note to self – play with that more.

So that’s the hardware setup, oh display is courtesy of a cheap Beko LCD TV which we will be upgrading when we actually have a lounge!

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Posted in Cool geek stuff, Media Center, Technology