Project: My Room and Everything in it [UPDATED: JAN 5]

Actually it is a bit warmer in my room than the rest of the house, but my mom keeps the house really cold so it is perfect in my room. I mentioned before that the three laptops on the coffe table are not my. I was doing repairs for school. I do have two however. One that is nice and only a year old. THe other is a hybrid of my first computer (a Dell Inspiron 4000) and another 4000 that I got for free. Neither were working, but I used the parts that did work from each and made one perfectly good 900mhz laptop.

Nick

 

hey
curious....but how on earth do you pay for power?! your running a LOT of hardware in there!and lots of little lights too! mind you i spose the trillion monitors being tfts helps!
but wow! great umm....mod?! lol. the end result is quite something!

 

LOL. Well, fortunately I am still at home, so the rents pay power, but I was looking at our bill one time, and I dont contribute to more than 30% of the power consumtion, and it is really probably much less than that. Also, all of the hardware I am running in there is on one 15 amp breaker, and I have never tripped it, so I guess I am doing ok. Although I don't push it, I do run an extension cord if I want to vaccum....

I will be back shortly with some pics. I got a nice box of goodies today....

 

Just thought I would post the small changes that have happened since the official finish.


First thing is the fun box of toys I got for free from my comp sci teacher!


Here they all are. There is actually some good stuff in there. I think 4 NICs and 3 HDDs (2GB to 20GB) and my favorite though, a TRIOS II HDD switching board.


Now this is an updated picture of my work area. The monitor on the right is new and I added the TV on top of the left monitor. It actually works really well there--especially as a TV preview in video editing.


Now with the flash. In this pic you can see the 2 audio monitor bars under the wood shelf. THey were free toys a while back.


These are my mess around PCs. The top one is a 1.7 Ghz PC from school. Someone dropped it and cracked the case, but it works fine. Since the HDD and CDROM were canabalized for repairs, I was given the rest. It has XP on it for now. Linux will probably invade soon though. The one below that is also from a friend of my grandfather--a P2 machine. It has ububtu server on it. THe bottom one is a friends old 400Mhz PC with FreeBSD on it. THis machine will probably be getting the TRIOS board to run multiple OSs. THe one on the right it my girlfriends old PC and it has ubuntu desktop on it.


This is where my old half laptop was but now a monitor is here. It is only for my print server/ other stuff machine right now, but soon will also havea switch to a dedicated linux HTTP/FTP server that will be a PC that I am soon getting from another friend because he wants me to get data off of it to put on his new PC.

THats it. I did say I would take pics of my sleeping room, but my parents have stashed a bunch of stuff in there for now, so it is a major mess. I did put a computer and monitor and speakers in there, however. This is running GeeXBoX (gotta love a 6 meg media OS).

Peace, Nick

 

can't ait to see what you do with the sleeping room! Looks good, i really like the desk, I was in ikea th other day and was thinking about gettin that desk... but then reralized it woldnt fir in the car! lol anyways, keep up the god work! plan on modding my computer room soon, and really looked to ur room for inspiration!

 

Hey, I am back again!! Yes as the updated thread title says, I have re-opened this thread because of this:


You can blame the girlfriend for it!! It inspired me to make my rooms "smart."

So, I just purchased a bunch of X10 home automation stuff with my christmas money, and I will also be working on some other projects. I bought the X10 stuff to start, but the book describes how the X10 system works, so I will probably (eventually) be making me own modules. My first 2 projects are the X10 setup and mute on ring. I basically am going to design a circuit that sends a IR signal to my TV and SPEAKERS to mute them if the phone rings. It should be fun. I will also be doing some other stuff too, but that is a good start.

Will be posting soon!!

Peace,
Nick

 

WOW !
that sounds so practical !!
if you find a good way to do that, please share, i have a phone laying around which i can use to detect ringing, and some relays to cut the power of my speaker's amp
need to do some voltage tests on the phone....

 

nice table !
very nice monitors i think

 

I will post later with some info the book gives about phone line voltages. I will probably (because of money) use the original remotes from the TV and Speakers and wire my detetion circuit to the PCB to send the signal (so basically have it press the button for me). I can afford to spare the remotes because I am getting a universal learning remote with my X10 system. Eventually I want to write a program to send out the IR signals from the really cool USB IR transciever...cant remeber the link. I will post the phone info and the link later.

Peace,
Nick

 

Haha, I knew this would never be finished. Look forward to the new stuff.

 

Twinsen - haha

So I got the info I promised. http://www.usbuirt.com/ is for the IR Transciever. It looks like a pretty nice piece of hardware. I may use some more x-mas money to purchase this toy. My ultimate goal is to use a modem (I have so many spare) and write software to detect the ring and send a mute signal. My problem is programming knowlege. I am very good at the logic, and have a decent knowlege of java, but that isnt what I need for this I assume. If anyone knows tutorials or anything else that could help, I would appreciate it.

Now onto info on phone line voltages. The phone ring signal is between 40 and 150 VAC at 20-86Hz. The voice signals are up to 4kHz and just a few volts.

Hope this may help, Nick

 

nice work on the room. mad props to you.

 

very nice,
exactly for that programming purpose you can use google to help you...

i thought of connecting relays to the ringing speaker of an old phone unit.... that could also be a good idea

 

I know google, google, but I was hoping someone might have a suggestion for something good.

Yeah I was thinking of something like that too. But for my learning experience, I want to try to build a circuit, and try the programming.

 

aha....

so good luck ! I'll be watching

 

wow , very nice setup you have there

 

Just a thought, perhaps you can implement a basic stamp from parallax or a similar microprocessor to handle this task. I'm not sure how to detect for a ringing phone (you're most likely going to have to hack a phone or add a sensor sensitive to phone ringing/flashing.

Hmm... just a thought... with such a microproc., you can implement a circuit inside a phone such that when voltage is sent to the speaker or ringer or flashing light(s) (if any), a circuit is triggered and flashes an IR signal that mimics your components' mute button. I know is kind of defeats the purpose of your automation plan, but it might provide a good prototyping and testing platform before moving to integrating the sensor/emitter into your automation scheme.

 

Thats a good Idea. I think I will try to learn some more about stamps..I dont really know much. As for detection of the ring, that I found out is easy. A few diodes and a resistor isolate the ring voltage.

I am a little behind on my programming and electronics knowledge, unfortunately. My school kinda sucks, so although I am enrolled in a Computer Sciences class (for 2 years now) I have learned nothing. In fact, I have actually taught my class from stuff that I learned on my own. It is difficult though, because I do not have a teacher that I can go to when I need help. As for electronics, well with my schedule, there was just no way for me to take this, so I have been reading up in my spare time (not much). I am working on a way to detect the ring using JAVA. I actually know a bit of Java (not as much as I wish, but I am getting there). Using java actually looks easier than I thought. I also have found some cool programs so that I can compile my java programs to native machine code (very useful because as much as I love java portability, I also HATE .class files...)


Sorry for the rant. I have been really frustrated, especially because the one good teacher and friend of mine that actually knew a lot about computers passed away last week. He was a great guy and a big inspiration for me, so that makes this a lot harder.

Peace, Nick

 

Well, this arrived today, much smaller than I was expecting.


Wow a lot is packed in there!


And a crapload of tiny boxes.


YAY! A whole bunch of automation stuff. I got:
1 3-way dimmer wall switch module
2 3-pin compatible relay modules
5 dimmable lamp modules
2 wireless motion sensors
1 Credit Card remote
1 palm pad wireless control
1 decora style wireless pad
1 5-in-1 learning remote (so nice is controls lighting and my TV/PC/everything)

I have already set it up mostly. I will post more pictures tomorrow of this finished and a few other small things that I have done. I already have some stuff programmed. I have a preset for watching movies, and another for just chilling and another for bed time. Anyways more later. I just wanted to post something.

Peace, Nick

 

why the hell would you need all this? you're 16 living with your parents and you have a room for a 35 year old aging hipster.