At long last, the time has finally come. I have managed to get all the parts ready to go ahead with the build of the MediaBox. So I wont bore you any more and dive right in. Here is the full list of the hardware that the MediaBox was built with.
Jun
03
I have been researching what power supply to use for the MediaBox for sometime now. The Omaura TF5 case seems to be limited to using a SFTX, Flex ATX or an Omaura DC-DC PSU.
SFTX
I haven't heard of an SFTX power supply before, and couldn't find much on the internet about it either. The closest match I could find was the SFX power supplies which is used inside mATX cases, but the specification on the Intel FTP site suggests a height of 63.5mm, but the height of the TF5 minus it's feet is around 50mm so using an SFX PSU was out of the question.
Flex ATX
My experience with Flex ATX is quite the opposite to the SFTX PSU.
Jun
03
As some of you may already know (for those who don't, check out Part 1 and Part 2 of my HOWTO on making a home-brew IR receiver for LIRC), I had made changes to the audio-alsa driver in LIRC to support sound cards that do not support capturing audio samples in stereo.
You will be glad to know that, as of 3nd June 2008 you can have this support directly in LIRC's CVS copy. To use the stereo feature you need to specify which channel to read the samples from, left or right. Here is an example on how to get irrecord listening to the right channel.
irrecord -d hw@44100,r file.config
If you want audio-alsa to capture samples from the left channel then specify 'l' instead of 'r'
May
25
Now that we have actually captured an IR signal in Part 1, we will move on to discover why the IR signal was only being captured on the Line-In input, and not on our desired input, CD-In. I mentioned that this could be due to a 1.6Vrms voltage restriction on the CD-In input pins on the ALC883/ALC889a codec on the motherboard. So in this part I will go over a very simple modification to the circuit to restrict the signal voltage to around 1.6Vrms.
I decided not to use a diode as Andrew Zabolotny suggests in his article on the LIRC website and opted to use a potential divider instead. There were two reasons for this is;
Pages: 1 · 2
May
23
I managed to grab myself a bargain from eBay. I came across a seller who had listed 5 brand new slim slot loading LITE-ON DVDRW drives, I picked one up for £17.25. Definitely in keeping with the low budget. Just waiting for it to arrive now, will let you all know over the weekend if it fits in the TF5 case.
XML Feeds
Recent Comments