Living Room PC
On moving in with Susanne, I faced a minor problem. The purple cube that was holding my VIA Mini ITX PC blended in very well with what could be described as a bachelor’s apartment, but there was some resistance to its prominent placement in the new house. Given that I had burned all of my CDs to MP3 and decided that I quite liked never having to change the CD, this was a bit of a challenge. The computer obviously had to be located in close proximity with the stereo equipment, but blend in with it.
Serendipitously, at about the same time Susanne asked me if I could have a look at her CD player, as it was broken. I had a look at it, and confirmed that it was broken, and more importantly, it was beyond my abilities to repair & probably not worth paying someone competent to work on it.
At this point, I had the perfect case. Put the computer in the old CD player case, which by definition was suitable to put in the lounge. Now because I had only just moved in, I decided that I had better check whether it was ok if I trashed the CD player first, and got the green light!
First order was to pull everything out of the case & salvage anything which looked like it might be useful at a later point, leaving an empty shell.
As with my previous machine, I decided for simplicity and improved airflow, I would keep the back of the case open. Yes, this does mean that I need to be careful plugging & unplugging cables, as the motherboard is unprotected, but this happened infrequently enough that I decided that it would not be a problem. Yes it is ugly, but no it is not anywhere you look at with any frequency.
There is quite a lot of space in the case, but when I upgraded to a full size DVD burner, rather than the laptop size CD burner which was in there previously, things got a bit tight, and the layout needed to be adjusted.
The motherboard is mounted on standoffs, which unfortunately have to be different heights. When drilling these, do yourself a favour and use a slightly bigger drill than the screws need. That way you will have a little slack in case your marking was not 100% accurate.
The hard drive would not quite fit any other way so got mounted on its side at an angle. Not exactly asthetically pleasing, but it works. The hard drive is just screwed to the chassis using the normal mounting screws.
The only part which required special placement was the CD/DVD drive, which, as logic would dictate, was placed in front of the CD flap. As this was formerly a 5 CD cassette changer, there was a flap rather than a drawer to deal with. To allow me to open the CD flap to put a disk in, I needed to add a screw to the side to use as a handle. You also need to open the flap to reach the eject button for the CD. Not ideal, but it works.
So far so good. Now for the input device. If you are going to put a PC in your living room you need some flexibility with the input device. No matter how pretty or invisible the case, a great big beige keyboard attached by a cord is going to spoil the show. Wireless is the only way to go. The problem with this is almost every wireless keyboard about comes with a separate mouse. Perfect for getting lost. What I wanted was a keyboard with a trackpoint built in. Simple. Well, not so simple, but after much searching I found a no name keyboard fitting the bill. The only identifying marks are the model number - SK-7100. Best of all it was cheap. When the batteries get down, it is a bit erratic, but other than that it works very well. Ironically, the extra keys are not supported under windows, but are at least partially in Linux – in the Fedora keyboard setup, the model is listed.
It plugs into the standard mouse & keyboard plugs, and leads to a IR receiver with you put on top of your PC. Or pull it apart, shorten the cables, and glue inside the display of the case.
The CD case had a big ugly on/off switch which was not of the momentary type the motherboard wanted. That and the fact that while the button was at the front, the switch was at the back, made using the existing power button too difficult to be worth the effort. Instead I use two of the function buttons and with a little soldering and trace cutting, they now do the job. Unfortunately I can’t remember which is which most of the time, but if I am rebooting it, then something has gone wrong, so either one will work fine!
Externally, there is not a great deal indicating that the box is anything but an old CD player visible.
And when it is in place, it blends right in, just as required.
I set up the pause, play and fast forward buttons on the keyboard to work with the MP3 player (XMMS), so the majority of the time that is all that needs to be done. This is just as well, as the resolution on the TV is too blurry to be able to read any details, unless you know what the options are. It is easy enough to run a few apps to get things running again after a crash, but not good enough for much more. I go in using http://www.tightvnc.com for maintenance, and when I need to use it.
I think it would be a good idea to set the thing up so that the play, pause & fast forward buttons on the face worked (though the serial port?), but I haven’t looked at this yet. Equally at this point you could use some unused functionality on one of the other remote controls with something like http://www.lirc.org/. The other improvement would be for the mp3 player & VNC to start running as soon as it is booted. Then it could be playing again after a lockup with one button.
The only problem I have had is the stock fan started running very noisily, so I replaced it with one of the same size I bought from Radio Shack. This worked nice and quietly for several months, until it nice and quietly seized, resulting in a cooked CPU. The fan on the new motherboard is noisier than I would like, but I am loath to make any changes for fear of blowing the motherboard again – the machine stays on all of the time.
The specs of the box are:
Via M10000 Nehemiah
120 Gb HDD
Running Fedora Core.
NEC 16x Dual Layer DVD burner
September 11th, 2006 at 3:36 pm
A couple of quick notes, since I have had the same setup (mini-itx integrated into the tv/stereo);
-Try 800×600 screen resolution, or even 640×480: you get less realestate, but you can read what’s on the screen
-For front controls, you could try a quick and easy matrix orbital with buttons, and integrate that.
-Starting the mp3 player and vncserver at bootup is pretty much super-easy (I have 3-click access to startup items in ubuntu)
However, to be honest; my needs were better met with making the pc a server/network storage device, and then using an origional xbox (With XBMC) to play music and video hosted on the server… I did spend a great deal of time with the personally constructed htpc though (which is why I went with the xbox. lol)
September 12th, 2006 at 6:47 pm
Hi Josh
I have thought a little about getting an xbox to use, but adding another box to the mix looks like making things more complicated, & I can’t really be bothered. There is plenty of space in the CD player box, so I have a bit of room for expansion yet.
I will check out the resolution next time I upgrade the OS & then I will learn how to put things in autorun (which I *know* must be pretty simple). Dunno when this will be though, too many projects, too little time.
Pat
September 28th, 2006 at 2:09 am
Cool mod. Looks like you put a lot of effort into you pc. I wish I could convince my wife to do the same with our useless cd player!
I am currently working on something similar. Unfortunately I don’t have a nice cd player box like yours. I will be using GeexBox which is a really good linux distro that can be customized using a user friendly ISO generator package. You can watch DVDs, play music and connect it to a network and play network music. You can also tune into a score of shoutcast stations. The best thing about it is that it only takes up 8 to 10 mb of hard drive space! You don’t even need a hard drive to be honest because you can boot it from a live cd. Pretty neat if you ask me. The only thing that I don’t like about it is that it does not support hotkey functions although it does support LIRC compliant remotes. (ATI Remote Wonder and a few others).
But again nice work!
September 28th, 2006 at 8:14 am
Dude,
Most of us geeks can stuff a Via mini mobo into a CD player, and have IR LEDs peeping at a w’less KBD, and the Linux stuf.. all that is a piece of cake,
Tell us about the hard bit - how did you get Susanne ?
av
September 28th, 2006 at 11:49 am
very good read up that, might take it into consideration when i get away from the phase of neons with windowed cases lol
an answer to the program startup is simple, navigate to this folder and drop the shortcut to the program in there
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
just change “username” for your own obviously
September 28th, 2006 at 12:31 pm
Nice work, Pat.
I’ve been using a VIA C3-processor motherboard (not Mini-ITX) for a server for a few years in my house, and the fan on the CPU got progressively noisier until it sounded like a tin of bolts being shaken - hardly ideal for a server that’s tucked in the corner of a living room! I replaced it with a fan from an old Pentium heatsink - it may have been seven years old, but it was a Cooler Master one, and it’s been running continuously for two years now without any problems.
To get those front buttons working, what I’d do is get a cheap USB gamepad and wire them up to the circuit in that. There’s a utility that I think is called joy2key which will happily convert those button presses to keystrokes, so you could set it up to control XMMS through that (or you could script something to do it). Or you could get a neat little gadget called an iPac from Ultimarc.com which is used by arcade cabinet fans to hook up arcade machine controls to PCs through the keyboard socket - but that’s going to be more expensive.
September 28th, 2006 at 12:37 pm
I think about building a HTPC for quite some time now.
After trying to figure out parts needed for the project, finding a suitable case, and a way to kill most of the noise, I decided I would be less expensive and easier to get an xbox and host everything on my main computer, in my office.
I like how it works so much, I bought a second xbox for my room.
September 29th, 2006 at 4:18 am
Hmm. I created a project almost exactly like this one, but I did it a year or two ago. I had the choice of using a case from a late 70’s cd player, or a more modern looking dvd player. I chose the dvd player because it was smaller, was a nice silver color and yet everything still fit inside. I even soldered the buttons on the front for power and reset, and used the existing Led’s for the power/hdd lights. The power button was a little tricky since it was a push-lock style button. I just disassembled it and removed the piece with kept it locked down every other push, so now it functions as a normal atx power switch. I used a very tiny motherboard which fit perfectly from front to back, and almost all the way side to side. The power supply I chose was an old 250(?) watt which is about 1/3 the size of a regular power supply (don’t ask me where I got it, because I don’t know), which I took out of it’s casing and mounted on the top lid to the dvd player along with the hard drive. Heat is not a very big problem for me because I chose a 500mhz processor I had already been using with that motherboard. All I need to do is cut out a hole above the fan in the shape of a custom fan grille. I will also mount another 1-2 fans somewhere in the case to cool the power supply which lost it’s original fan when it was removed from its casing. I haven’t finished the back cover, but all I need to do is cut out the ports for the random connections I will be using. I have not used any standoffs in mounting everything, and instead just chose to put in a 1/16″ thick layer of random plastic material I had laying around. Even though this is not done, it is still functional. I have pictures if you want to check it out. I will finish the project if I see enough interest in it.
September 29th, 2006 at 12:02 pm
av
You guys have toasted my bandwidth as it is, do you really think my next writeup would be “how to get a girlfreind”? I can just imagine the slashdotting I would get from THAT one!
Sheesh.
September 29th, 2006 at 12:49 pm
Thats so funny. I put the guts of a pc into an old VCR I had. It turned out real cool and no one will ever know it’s a PC. it still flashes 12:01 am. I’m just waiting for some one to try and put a tape into it.
October 4th, 2006 at 12:21 pm
[…] I needed a case for my computer with would blend into the living room, where it would be playing MP3’s. About this time, a broken CD player came along, and an unholy marriage resulted - The PC in a CD player was born!read more | digg story […]