I’ll keep posting from time to time, but comments are dead for now.

I used to spend a lot of time playing with various home theater toys. It was one of my main hobbies before I owned a house. Once I bought a house, my priorities changed a bit out of necessity. When we got the house, I did replace my diy video screen with an electric drop down screen. Then I sold my old projector and replaced it with a 720p Mitsubishi. I’m a bit on the cheap side when it comes to HT gear. I’m far too used to Moore’s Law in computing. I thought I’d post a bit about the state of my cheap geek home theater.

Let me talk about my goals for the project: Enjoyment! I want good sound! I don’t want to cringe if things get broken! (I have kids after all.) My kids are allowed to use everything. My wife needs to be able to use it without turning into the incredible hulk. Oh, and it’s got to be awesome.

0) Just a bit regarding layout. See the doorway above? It meant that I was limited to a 16:9 for maximum screen size. The setup needed to be centered on the wall for ascetics. I also built in a cabinet that goes into my garage. That provides inset shelving for my audio gear. It also has a door on the back. I can walk into the garage, open the door and access all my wiring without bending over – and there’s good lighting in my shop! This has saved my sanity for years now. I love it every time I need to access stuff. I recently pulled the TV feeds through the wall, so now I just need to get the controller for the screen tucked away and the only wires will be the speaker lines. I’m OK with seeing the wires – wife not so much. I also added the can lights to the room. All of them are on dimmers and light the room in three sections. The room used to be all brown paneling. Now it’s all textured drywall. The Ceiling is a dark Matte color in the palette with the walls to reduce reflection from the screen. Finally, the drop down screen is mounted to a pair of wood spacers that place it in front of the plasma for clearance.

1) Plasma screen” I have a commercial grade Panasonic plasma that weighs something like 80 lbs. It’s pretty hard core. Cost: infinite (Hand me down from father in law) Ok, it was free but I did have to fetch it from Texas. Advantage? Saves projector life, it’s usable during the day with the windows uncovered. Actual cost: $0.

2) Projector: Mitsubishi HC-1500. This unit has served me well. It’s 720p and uses bulbs that clock in at around $100. It’s hard to replace it with a newer unit based on TCO. Cost: $800 new. $600 was offset by my old projector. Actual cost: $200

3) Now semi retired Onkyo 7.1 home theater system. This was a refurb that has since keeled over. It was around $300. It was a great deal with speakers, subwoofer and receiver. The speakers are still in use.

3.1) New receiver: Pioneer Elite SC-25. This was a total ebay score. New retail in 2009 was $1800. 140 watts per channel, 1080p video scaling, multiple zone support, very good sound. The seller couldn’t get it to work with hdmi. The manual is 150 pages long. I guessed that it was user error and appear to have been correct! Total cost with shipping: $100.

4) Electric screen – 104″  16:9 Flexio electric screen. (Links to the 103″ version)This is a Chinese made, but good quality screen. The drop down provides the ability to use the plasma or the screen and keeps the screen safe from kids who may be throwing things (balls, snot, etc). The kids are getting older, but it’s nice not to worry about it. It was my treat to myself when we closed on the house: Total Cost: $230.

5) Blu-ray player – Sony BDP-S570. This player does netflix, hulu, is made by the king of blu-ray (it’s a Sony Format) and does a great job. Cost $130. The user interface could be better, but even the 6 year old has managed to use it.

6) XBox 360 – used for nefarious purposes. Rock band, odd video playback, etc. It was hijacked by my wife from my office, I spent $100 to replace my office unit later on. Cost $100.

7) 2010 Mac Mini – This Mac had issues with ram over 2Gb. It appears to be the controller rather than a particular stick of ram. This was my old home machine forever, so cost for the HT was $0. I added an old apple remote that was getting tossed out at work. It runs Mac OS 10.8 and the Plex media player client. It provides HDMI out for the projector and VGA to the plasma (which doesn’t have an HDMI port). It’s also great for playing emulated games like NES, etc. New cost for the Mac was $600. Actual cost for the theater since it long paid for itself in consulting work: $0.

8) Cables. Over the years, I’ve spent about $100-150 at Monoprice.com on various cables. Those include 50ft HDMI and Component video cables (projector), short HDMI, Audio and TOSlink.

That’s it for the home theater proper. Now we need to add some nerd stuff.

My media storage system is based on the Plex media server. I store my videos on a mac and Plex provides access to systems via the internet, to mobile phones, iPads and my plex player Mac Mini. I have a few other tricks to make it even sweeter. The Plex server is acutally a virtual machine that lives on a VMware ESXi host. Why? I do alot of consulting work with VMware and running the system as a virtual machine means that I can replace the physical host as needed. I can add more ram, storage, processor – all without making major changes to the virtual Mac. The server I use cost about $300 and has totally paid for itself in consulting earnings. Cost: $0. (not including power to keep it running)

A bit of info on the server itself. It’s got four SATA drive bays, 8Gb of ram, and a quad core server grade Xeon CPU. It’s running ESXi 5.1 and sits quietly in a corner of my house. It’s pretty sweet!

So, what’s coming in the future? At some point I’ll get a 1080p projector. Before that, I’m thinking of building some custom speakers. This depends on getting my new gantry CNC mill up and running, but it’ll happen! I’ll be doing a MTM (Mid, Tweeter, Mid design) but am still researching options for design. I’d really like to come up with something unique that really takes advantage of my manufacturing process rather than just a plain box design. The audio from the new Pioneer is great! I feel like the sub is coming up a little short, so I may have a sonotube in my future.

This particular unit is an interesting beast. It’s essentially a mini-fridge chassis (built for heat rather than cold). Up top is a standard grill smoke release hole, in the bottom is a undersized 500 watt heating element. Mounted on the side is the ‘Bradley smoke generator’. The smoke generator is actually very effective. A simple motorized slider delivers a preformed puck to a small hot plate. Once a puck is used up (timer based) it’s pushed off the hot plate by a replacement puck. The previous puck’s carcass is dropped neatly into a bowl of water – keeping the puck from reducing to ash. The heater control is pretty lame. If you’re not a modder, then consider the higher end digital controlled bradleys. They’re not much more online and look very nice. But we’re not here to talk about that…

So, I took a look at existing mods and quickly identified the primary needs.

1) Not enough heat. There’s enough coming off that element to make it work and keep people from burning their food. However, it’ll really suck to try to use on a cold/windy day. So, either add an additional heating element or a full on 900 watt element.

2) Temperature control – Adding a PID controller with SSR is the preferred method. Same tech I use on my espresso machine. Thermistors are a nice option – low component count.

3) Monitoring – We don’t want to open that thing very often. More information is better! Wifi and perhaps a custom rolled iphone app. I’ll use a pre-existing project as a base and tweak it for my needs.

4) Smoke control – I managed to over smoke some meats right out of the gate. They came out ok with some sauces, but I’m going to need the ability to dial it down. (Smoke for 3 hours, then cook for the finish…)

Parts list for this adventure:

Linksys WRT54GL – The linux modder friendly platform – with two ttl serial ports onboard, customizable linux distros for it and an existing project: Linkmeter – bbq monitoring platform.

Arduino – yeah yeah, it’s quick and reliable. I’ll develop with a full on device and swap in a boarduino for efficiency after the fact.
Maverick ET-72 replacement probes These are thermisters in a nice food save enclosure. We’ll use them to monitor internal temps of food.

K-Type Thermocouple – We’ll use this to monitor the smoker temperature and use it to determine when to drive the heating element. This is a very effective method – it’s worked on my espresso machine for the last two years without failure.

Solid State Relays – A pair of these will allow the Arduino/router to control both the heating elements and the smoke generator. Yes, we could even smoke a bit, cook for a bit, then smoke for a bit.

Additional parts will be used of course, but I’ll raid those from my standard stock. Oh, that includs a AD595 chip for reading the temp of the thermocouple. There are nicer newer chips, but it’s reliable and through hole mount. And I’ve already got it.

The basic design is here:

And a few more resources:

Here’s a similar project, but stand alone (no router)

It was bound to happen. My Mac Mini started to crash, and hard. When I’d login, it was a crap shoot until it would lock up. Eventually it started happening immediately after login! It’s about 1 year old and I could have sent it off to apple. Being me, I decided to do a fresh lion install on a new hard drive and see if it was actually a hardware issue or just a drive/software issue. After the install, I booted up and ran perfectly on a USB connected hard drive.

I had no problems copying my data off the old system drive. This is rather interesting… However I have a suspicion. I have seen rather ugly issues with device drivers lately – I highly suspect that the usb serial drivers I’d installed under snow leopard were causing issues under lion. I’m now slowly re-adding my software and drivers (half in fear of running into the same issue again).

Meanwhile, I did take a few steps to ensure that I can recover things. Sure, Lion has a new recovery system but I don’t want to download it for install each time. I used a trick that my server admin buddies told me about – create a second partition (say, 8Gb at the tail of your drive) and use disk utility to restore the system install iso/dmg/etc to that partition. Now you have a hard drive speed install disc that can’t be lost (unless your drive totally eats it).

Replacing the drive wasn’t quite trivial, but after a trip to Sears for a new set of mini-torx (I needed a T-8) I didn’t have any issues swapping the drive. To pop the mini logic board, I used a pair of dremel tool bits rather than hunt down the tool. Thanks for the tutorial ifixit.com

And the drive? I had a 500gb western digital blue that I’d picked up a few months ago for another project. Glad I got it!

iPhone jailbreak notes:

I used an iPhone 3g, downloaded 4.2.1 iphone firmware and used pwnageTool_4.2 to build jailbroken firmware.
(then did it all over again to build unlockable firmware – update baseband to 6.10: (add link)
First stop was to configure wireless to talk to my home network.
Then I hit Cydia (the app that’s loaded when jailbroken.) and updated everything it wanted.
Get cell service (you can do this later):
Install ultrasn0w and get a pay as you go t-mobile account activated on it.

Now it’s time for software:

Install openssh via cydia.
ssh onto the phone and change the passwords for the root and mobile users.

I also install veency – it’ll allow you to vnc onto your iphone, making it much easier to do all your work from your computer. Set a password in settings if you like.

We want perl, so add the coredev.nl repo:
download http://coredev.nl/cydia/coredev.pub on your machine. Then scp it to root@yourphonesip:/var/root
ssh to the phone and run: apt-key add coredev.pub
then run: echo ‘deb http://coredev.nl/cydia iphone main’ > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/coredev.nl.list
Now when you load cydia next, you can get perl installed.

Use Cydia to install the following packages. Instead of confirm after each, just hit continue queuing and add things to be installed. Then you can go to manage or just hit confirm on the final package you want to install.

minicom
perl
perl-dbd-sqlite(search for dbd::sqlite)
perl device serial (search for device::serial)
vimproved (This is vim, find something else if you don’t do vi.)

Later we’ll want a command line sms sender, but for now I haven’t decided which to use yet.

Set things up:

Set up Minicom:
As root mkdir /usr/etc
Run minicom -s, set serial to /tty.iap, set 9600 N81, turn off flow control
Save config as default.
install vi (or vim for the search to work) (I like vim. deal.)

If you have a serial port dock built, now’s the time to test your port. My first phone had a bad dock connector, so no serial on it. Luckily I had a spare laying around with a bad home button. I swapped the screens and was good to go.

If you’re getting a data plan, it might be nice to ssh into the phone over the nat’d edge/3g/whatever you paid for:

install autossh.
Follow this how-to: http://llemarie.wordpress.com/2009/09/05/tip-connect-to-your-iphone/
install p5-Device-modem (which gets you device::serial)

Congratulations. Now you have the equivalent of a funky linux (yeah, it’s bsd. I know.) box with geolocation, 3g, wifi and a serial port. Muhahah.

Test Fixture Evaluates Motors/Props/ESC for Quadcopter Performance from Old Man Mike on Vimeo.

Yesterday, Hack-A-Day had a nice write up listing the various development boards available these days for projects. If you’re looking for a brain for your next creation, you should definitely check it out. It includes boards that start at $4 and up.

I upgraded my desk at home a bit with a new monitor – A Samsung P2770H – a pretty decent 27″ 1080P display. I was wondering how I might calibrate it and the pair of 24″ displays next to it to have reasonable color matching and ran across this article on doing the job with your digital SLR.

First off, this is a great idea. DSLR manufacturers put alot of time and money into color calibration. The main trick is to have a neutral grey to get things correct. There are some caveats for this: Using a neutral gray card will allow you to calibrate your colors to match the lighting/ambiance in the room. This could result in a funky calibration, but mostly due to ambient lighting and reflective surfaces. Your monitor doesn’t reflect color so you could get some odd results. However, you should end up with a decently balanced color wheel.