Stewart Priest

HDMI over Cat5e

// June 28th, 2010 // No Comments » // DIY, Tech

As you may have read, I’ll be moving into my own place very soon, and this will give me the opportunity to ‘Pimp My House’. She Who Must Be Obeyed (SWMBO) has largely given me free reign to do whatever I like so long as “there aren’t cables running all over the house”. Well, there will, but none you’ll see.

The key element of any smart home is structured cabling – in my case Cat5e. I was planning on running HDMI to a couple of different rooms, but in lengths greater than 10 metres, its unreliable and expensive. So, how do I plan to get the HDMI signal from my V+ box in the loft, to my TV in the living room? By using a pair of HDMI baluns, of course! By using a pair of these boxes, I can use my structured cabling to send the HDMI signal from the V+ box to my TV. Simples! In case you’re wondering what these baluns look like, here they are:

Quite small and unobtrusive, I think you’ll agree. It’d be easy enough to cable-tie one of these bad boys to the wall mount or the VESA fitting at the back of the TV, or just to hide away with the rest of the cables, so SWMBO will be happy, and this leads to a quiet life for me. Its really a win-win situation. SWMBO is happy, I don’t have to spend loads of money on long HDMI cables and these boxes are £30 on Amazon. In fact, you can buy them here.

I’ll post a review when I put them to use, but all in all, these look great!

New House, New Project

// May 9th, 2010 // No Comments » // DIY, Tech, Windows 7

Those of you who follow my Twitter feed may already be aware of this, but for those of you who don’t, Jen and I have bought a house. It’s all very exciting, for a number of reasons. One of which is that I’ve been allowed to put all the tech I want into it! I suspect that Michelle will be very jealous.

I’ve been a fan of home automation for a long time, and whilst still living at home with the parents, I’ve been able to experiment with X10 with great success. Thankfully, the house is all on one level, with loft access. So far, it’s been decided that I’ll be running Cat5 cable to every room – maybe not the bathroom, but there’s still potential for that if I can justify it – along with speaker cable and possibly two or three HDMI cables.

I’ll have an automation server running Homeseer as a backend to the house, which will pull together pretty much all the tech in the house. My main media server will run Windows Home Server, serving up audio and video to Windows 7 PCs which run Windows Media Center.

Broadcast media will arrive in the house in a variety of different ways: 2 Virgin Media boxes will provide cable TV to either the TVs directly, or to the Windows 7 boxes to be played out via WMC; at least one Freesat box (there’s already a satellite dish feeding into the house); and regular old council telly – Freeview.

My studio equipment will live in its own room, herein referred to as my studio. The studio PC will live in the loft along with the servers so I can reduce the equipment noise in the studio itself. Monitor and keyboard/mouse will arrive in the room via an Adder standalone KVM box.

I’m sure there will be all kinds of pitfalls along the way, but with the help of the folks over at Automated Home, I’m sure things will go pretty well! Stay tuned for more news on the tech house. I can’t wait!