Sweat Equity – Hiding the Gear – Part 2

// December 29th, 2010 // construction, gear

Now, this is getting to the good part. Hookin’ it all up. Getting some BOOM going. We have the access door ready to roll, and we tested the gear. Now to get the Death Star operational so we can keep rogue star systems inline for their incessant insolence. Darth Digipimp in the house, ready to crush.

Back in Part 1, I took you through the construction of the access door, and the test rack for getting a bead on where things fit. Next is getting the final setup installed behind the access door.

During the planning for the test rack, I started sketching out a schematic for the basic equipment, to make sure I had all the bases covered.

cribmac schematic 02252010



Here are the big pieces of my initial system before later upgrades:

  • Onkyo TX-605 Home Theater Receiver
  • Onkyo DVD Player (bundled with HTIB)
  • FiOS TV Motorola 6416 Dual-Tuner HD-DVR
  • Mac Mini (plus an assload of external storage)
  • Nintendo Wii
  • Sony Playstion 2
DSC_2318


With this gear installed on the rack, I’m ready for the long task of hooking everything up. Here’s where having a schematic really helps. As you can see from the pictures, there’s a rat’s nest of cables all over the back of this rack. I cannot over emphasize how important it is to have labels, nylon ties, twist ties, and velcro straps. It makes this part of the job so much better. Took a lot of patience to get it all wrangled.

DSC_0200


With the speaker wires already terminating near the rack location, that portion of the hookup was easy. The conduit wiring also dumps out in the ceiling above the rack. When I mounted the projector, I installed 2 HDMI, 1 VGA cable, and 1 composite cable. Even though I don’t plan to use them all, it makes sense to take advantage of the connections for some redundancy and future use.

Once everything was installed and tested, I had one issue to deal with—how to handle IR signals from the remotes. Luckily, I had a hold-over Radio Shark Special IR Repeater. After dinking around with placement, I managed to get reasonable performance from my remotes while sitting in the room. But as we will see in a later post, an interesting problem came up when we painted the room.

With that bit of work done, it was time to drive slow around the galaxy, and scare some puny planets. Now where is the Princess?

=|>

Related Posts

  1. Sweat Equity – Hiding the Gear – Part 1
  2. Getting the Gear – Which Mac?
  3. Getting the Gear – Picking a Projector
| More

Leave a Reply