Dianemo Exposed - Building a super affordable Dianemo System

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We're always interested to hear from customers about their experiences and projects they implement with Dianemo. Recently I spoke to a customer that had put together a system around an Intel NUC PC and several Raspberry Pi's and i thought that I would give you an overview of his system.

The Intel NUC this customer used is this one http://www.quietpc.com/int-nuc-de3815tykhe?gclid=Cj0KEQiAwaqkBRDHx6rzxMqAobgBEiQAxJazJ9ZrsIb5n_3kFicTc0I3m-b9KU8fEswtiMVNCvcHUggaAslN8P8HAQ

At just over £100 UKP this NUC PC makes for an incredibly affordable NerveCentre (our name for a Core). You need to add some memory, an SSD and a USB NIC to that but its still way affordable. The NUC is really tiny, just 190x116x40 mm in size, and it uses just 5w of energy when running which is incredibly low for an X86 based machine. The NUC is a completely fanless design and because you typically use an SSD with it there are no moving parts at all...and so it is truly silent in operation. This tiny, cold running & silent machine means you can basically locate it anywhere and it will not get in the way or make even a small bedroom buzz with fan noise.

Because this customers system was installed in a new, small 2 bedroom apartment it was decided that wifi was the way to go for all components of the system. Their are 4 Raspberry Pi's in this system - one is connected to the Living Room SmartTV for CEC control and audio and the others are used purely for audio streaming in the Kitchen/Bedrooms. All the Raspberry Pi's connect to the apartments Wifi network driven from the LAN side of the NC as usual. This system has a small NAS (not sure of the make) for streaming ripped video and iTunes via LMS - again nothing special there. There is also a sprinkling of ZWave devices in this system too - some lighting, PIR's and temp/humidity sensors.

The impressive thing about this system is that its doing all this on such affordable and energy efficient hardware and all over wifi too. Total cost of the hardware for this system was about £430 UKP (or about 675 USD) which is amazingly affordable.

For more information or questions pm me here or email me at inquiries@ellipticalcurve.com

All the best

Andy