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tschak: I tried to do a search to see what your hourly rates are like and couldn't find it. I would love to know because my job will hopefully soon allow me to send some money this project's way. Maybe we should get a sticky where developers can post their hourly rates?

emachala: can you elaborate a bit on the cat6 setup? I wasn't aware you could do that. It sounds pretty useful. So you don't have mediadirectors anywhere, you just have cat6 to the tv? Do you need media directors in a room somewhere in the house then? Can you use one beefy computer as a media director for lots of tvs using this method?

Hi,

Here's some observations. I'm in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, so maybe I'm way off and things are way cheaper in Arizona, but:

1. You should think about exactly what you want in each room. You could blow 5 grand just on the tvs for the 5 bedrooms, kitchen, office and backyard. For a massive house like that I think a ten grand budget would be more reasonable. If you can't spend that then you need to scale back or change your expectations.

Basically, If you want home automation, you're looking at spending ~45 dollars per switch (z-wave) instead of $5 a switch(if you have multiple switches on a light you only need to replace 1 of them) so you need to count all of the stuff you want  to automate and multiply it by 45 dollars. Then look at all the places you want security cameras and multiply that by whatever they cost ($100 is probably reasonable, I could be way off). Then look at all the places you want tv's and add ~350 for the frontends to run the tv's. On top of that you need a core in the basement which will probably cost approx $1000 for a decent one, and at some point as you get more media you will probably want to throw a NAS on the network as well, which adds more cost. On top of this you will probably want several orbiters (think super fancy universal remotes), which will set you back between 200-600 each, depending on what you go with as the hardware.

If you don't want any home automation and you already own all the tv's you need, then you could probably do this for 5 grand. You would spend approx 3200 on media directors for the 9 locations you mentioned, 1000 on a core and then buy a couple orbiter platforms with whatever is left.

2. I haven't heard of voice control in this product, but I don't have one set up yet (still trying to buy the house), so I could be wrong.

3. run cat6 everywhere you want a tv with linuxmce on it. You'll need it.

4. You can't centralize their consoles and use them everywhere. That's impractical for several technical reasons (how would you change games? What is the range on the wireless game controllers? You might be able to hack something together in linuxmce to pipe the video from the console to the rooms, but that still would leave you unable to change games and control the game).


I hope this helps.

Cheers,

Chris

Hi,

Anyone use on of these intel boards for a frontend? It looks pretty sweet to me. Mini-itx form factor, built in dual 1.6 Ghz atom processor, onboard gigabit lan. If this thing had an HDMI out port it would be perfect.

Hi, anyone used a board with this in: Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator X3500 integrated ?

Did UI2 work? Any problems?
I'm thinking about buying the asus P5E-VM HDMI motherboard for a frontend but it has intel graphics... Any help figuring out if the drivers are good and support ui2 and beyond would be much appreciated.

You guys rock, I'll be happy whenever you can get this thing out.

Merry Christmas.

It's gotta be plugged in at all time... This would be interesting if it had a battery and could go into sleep mode....

So this thing can write dvd+r's? Damn.. I've been looking for something like this for a while, but I gave up thinking they didn't exist for under a grand... This would be a great way to back up my raid array.. Load 200 DVD +r's, start it burning and go on vacation for a week;) Any word on another 200 + disc changer that can burn dvd+r's that is also cheap?

I've been using 4 750's from seagate for 2 months now with no problems. I've got them in the bottom compartment of the antec p180B case and one thing I noticed is that without proper ventilation these things get crazy hot. Due to the design (fault) of the case it's easy for sata/power cables from the drives to get stuck in the fan  cooling the hard drives in the bottom compartment of the p180B case. This is what initially happened to me and the drives got crazy hot (I burnt my finger on one of them!). I fixed the fan blockage and now it's fine. Smartd doesn't detect any problems and neither does the seagate software. Here's to hoping they continue to work great...

wow, so it's pretty much exactly the via reference design with a faster CPU, or atleast it looks like it's a faster cpu from their specs.

Perhaps you guys can sort this out for me. I'm thinking about how I'm going to setup my linuxmce system and I don't see a place for these types of things in it. In the main rooms there will be tv's and mythboxes (as well as good stereo equipment in the main listening area). I don't know where  a squeezebox would fit because it doesn't come with built in speakers or anything. it looks like you still have to run wires to an amplifier and from there to speakers to make it work. I could see a use for something like this in a kitchen or some other place where you would want audio but not necessarily video, but for a purpose like that having the bulk of the amplifier and speakers that aren't attached seems to outweigh the benefit. Where and how are you guys using these things?

as mentioned earlier, we should just use launchpad. We're integrating with kubuntu anyway, and it's what they use to track the ubuntu project, and it's free and it has great bug tracking via bazaar. Did I mention it's free and we can have it setup in an hour if there is an svn repository to pull from? Oh yah, and anyone can make a branch for themselves to play in?

it looks like we can get free hosting on launchpad.net, any particular reason why we aren't using that? It has a good bug reporting system as well.

most likely shortly after it is released. They seem to be following the kubuntu release schedule now.

Hi,
It would be great if there was an irc channel for linuxmce. I vote for #linuxmce on irc.freenode.net