Items Tagged With hardware

Submission by David Pullen

Some of you will know that I am a big fan of the VIOM from Phaedrus. I use 4 VIOMs to control my heating, some windows and blinds, led lights, electromagnetic locks and also to take inputs from motion detectors and a variety of other devices. Some of the VIOMs are connected directly via the serial port and some over ethernet via MSS100s from Lantronix. It is rather helpful being able to connect the VIOMs over the network and so I was pleased to hear that Phaedrus was producing the Netiom. When I contacted Roy Schofield (at Phaedrus) I was even more interested to hear that he was planning to work on a xAP-enabled Netiom...

We've just received the following press release from one of our sponsors, offering a 10% discount on the new Sonos multi-room system...

"Sonos allows music enthusiasts to enjoy their digital music collections in any room in the house - using wireless amplifiers controlled by wireless handheld colour screen remote controls.

Sonos can connect to music held in a variety of formats including MP3 and FLAC, stored either on PCs, Macs or even network storage servers. Sonos has been greeted with rave reviews since its launch in the USA, both from the press and from users for its amazing ease of use, cutting edge design and of course its great sound quality.

To celebrate the UK launch, Pluggedin.tv are offering 10% discount on all Sonos items ordered before June 30th 2005 - so now is the time to get that professional multi-room audio system you always wanted at a truly DIY price...

I've just uploaded the write-up on my new Jukebox/NAS machine at home. There are photos and costs too...

"Since ripping and centralising all our DVDs and CDs a few years ago our "Jukebox" server had grown and grown and was in need of replacement. With 5 years of digital photographs taking up 10s of gigabytes alone and ripped DVDs taking anywhere from 3gig to 9gig each!, no matter how much disk space you have it never seems quite enough.

The donated ancient motherboard and RAM that I had received three years ago had performed well. Despite being a lowly Pentium Pro 200 with 128meg, it had coped admirably with serving multiple PCs, Xboxes and other IP clients. However the drive bay configuration in the old AT rackmount case (that had been "modified" with a hacksaw to allow the ATX board to be fitted) meant there was no room left to add any more hard disks, and keeping the drives that were already in there cool was becoming a major issue too...

Old Timer
Since ripping and centralising all our DVDs and CDs a few years ago our "Jukebox" server had grown and grown and was in need of replacement. With 5 years of digital photographs taking up 10s of gigabytes alone and ripped DVDs taking anywhere from 3gig to 9gig each!, no matter how much disk space you have it never seems quite enough.

The donated ancient motherboard and RAM that I had received three years ago had performed well. Despite being a lowly Pentium Pro 200 with 128meg, it had coped admirably with serving multiple PCs, Xboxes and other IP clients. However the drive bay configuration in the old AT rackmount case (that had been "modified" with a hacksaw to allow the ATX board to be fitted) meant there was no room left to add any more hard disks, and keeping the drives that were already in there cool was becoming a major issue too...

Phaedrus have just added a xAP enabled version of their "Netiom" product to their on-line catalogue...

"Netiom-xAP is a stand-alone network aware xAP enabled Input / Output module which can be controlled over most networks. Netiom-xAP has 16 digital, 4 analogue inputs, 16 digital outputs and an RS232 serial port all of which can be controlled using xAP messaging or via the internet using a web browser. Netiom-xAP fully supports the BSC schema as well as introducing its own native netiom schema. The BSC support is ideal for controlling individual nodes while the netiom schema is useful for controlling groups of nodes...