entropy
25 Feb 2006, 5:55am
This guy took the idea of a media PC to a whole new level. I'm seriously impressed, and if my main audio system wasn't in my room, I might look into making one of these... (it's long, you've been warned)
Thought I'd share my project with you now I have it all working. My 600+ CD collection was getting a bit unwieldy and most of them were in storage which is fairly useless if you want to play them. I hatched a plan over Christmas to get all the CD's on my PC and make some sort of jukebox to play them by my hifi. <br />
I'm not a fan of the following : keyboards, mice and noise. The first two get in the way and collect dust, the last one just gets in the way of the music. So I decided to make a totally silent PC with a touchscreen monitor. <br />
<br />
After some looking round I purchased a copy of "Touchtone Audio System" for $24.95 which is a pretty good front end for Winamp, organising your tunes but is designed for use with a touch screen ( big buttons! ) :<br />
<br />
<img border=0 src="http://www.upuaut.net/jukebox/touchtone-audiosystem.jpg"><br />
<br />
Secondly I tracked down a 8" touch screen from EBay ( Needs to support 800x600 natively ). Found one with a nice stand, delivery was seriously slow but 5 weeks later it turned up, gave me some time to concentrate on the control PC and rip 600+ CD's!<br />
<br />
Now I'd never seen a TOTALLY silent PC, they all have fans in yeah ? Well actually no a company called Tranquil ( <a href="http://www.tranquilpc.co.uk/">http://www.tranquilpc.co.uk/</a> ) make some based on the passive cooled VIA ITX boards. I ordered a T3 600Mhz model with 256Mb RAM and a wireless card / CF Riser. Was about £300 all in. I'd already decided by this point that even laptop hard drives make noise so I was going to boot off a CF Card. You're not going to get many MP3's on a CF so......<br />
<br />
So where's the music going to live you ask ? Well I have a Debian server running SaMBa in a spare room with a pair of 320Gb WD drives in a mirror, all the music files live on there. The only thing the Tranquil PC does is play them and run the Touch Screen. <br />
<br />
So the plan was , music lives on Debian server, Tranquil PC boots Windows XP from CF and pulls music via wireless. I built the Tranquil PC using a latop hard drive as CF cards have finite writes before they die. Using a very cut down version of Windows XP ( I stripped pretty much EVERYTHING you don't need out - booted into 37Mb of RAM usage ) I set it to autorun the Touch Tone. <br />
<br />
To minimise writes on to the CF card I installed the EWF file system ( check <a href="http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/lpt/a/6278">http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/lpt/a/6278</a> ). EWF is a storage filter that protects volumes from unneeded writes, committing them at shutdown as opposed to all the time, you have to switch swap and system restore off, but they already were anyway. <br />
<br />
Once I was happy with the system running from the laptop hard drive I use Ghost to image it from the hard drive to a CF card ( use a CF to IDE adaptor ) and inserted it into the Tranquil PC :<br />
<br />
<img border=0 src="http://www.upuaut.net/jukebox/IMG_3761_resize.JPG"><br />
<br />
The wireless card goes on top :<br />
<br />
<img border=0 src="http://www.upuaut.net/jukebox/IMG_3762_resize.JPG"><br />
<br />
Powering on a totally silent PC is really wierd these days, this setup makes zero noise at all. You're not going to be running 3DMARK 2006 on it mind....<br />
Anyway after some fine tuning with the touch screen calibration and other bits and bobs :<br />
<br />
<img border=0 src="http://www.upuaut.net/jukebox/ttss1.jpg"><br />
<br />
Voila! All my music available at the touch of a button !<br />
<br />
<img border=0 src="http://www.upuaut.net/jukebox/ttss2.jpg"><br />
<br />
Shows the cover art whilst playing. <br />
<br />
<img border=0 src="http://www.upuaut.net/jukebox/ttss3.jpg"><br />
<br />
With a CD for scale.<br />
<br />
<img border=0 src="http://www.upuaut.net/jukebox/ttss4.jpg"><br />
<br />
The Tranquil PC at night ( since disconnected the blue LED - too bright at night ).<br />
<br />
<img border=0 src="http://www.upuaut.net/jukebox/ttss5.jpg"><br />
<br />
System in place, Tranquil PC on top left.<br />
<br />
So there you go one months toil which was surprisingly easy to implement. Hardest bit is making sure all your cover art and tags are correct. You could do this project with a laptop drive in the Tranquil and there is no reason why this set up couldn't be dropped in a car. <br />
Thanks for reading !</td></tr>
</td></tr></table>
Thought I'd share my project with you now I have it all working. My 600+ CD collection was getting a bit unwieldy and most of them were in storage which is fairly useless if you want to play them. I hatched a plan over Christmas to get all the CD's on my PC and make some sort of jukebox to play them by my hifi. <br />
I'm not a fan of the following : keyboards, mice and noise. The first two get in the way and collect dust, the last one just gets in the way of the music. So I decided to make a totally silent PC with a touchscreen monitor. <br />
<br />
After some looking round I purchased a copy of "Touchtone Audio System" for $24.95 which is a pretty good front end for Winamp, organising your tunes but is designed for use with a touch screen ( big buttons! ) :<br />
<br />
<img border=0 src="http://www.upuaut.net/jukebox/touchtone-audiosystem.jpg"><br />
<br />
Secondly I tracked down a 8" touch screen from EBay ( Needs to support 800x600 natively ). Found one with a nice stand, delivery was seriously slow but 5 weeks later it turned up, gave me some time to concentrate on the control PC and rip 600+ CD's!<br />
<br />
Now I'd never seen a TOTALLY silent PC, they all have fans in yeah ? Well actually no a company called Tranquil ( <a href="http://www.tranquilpc.co.uk/">http://www.tranquilpc.co.uk/</a> ) make some based on the passive cooled VIA ITX boards. I ordered a T3 600Mhz model with 256Mb RAM and a wireless card / CF Riser. Was about £300 all in. I'd already decided by this point that even laptop hard drives make noise so I was going to boot off a CF Card. You're not going to get many MP3's on a CF so......<br />
<br />
So where's the music going to live you ask ? Well I have a Debian server running SaMBa in a spare room with a pair of 320Gb WD drives in a mirror, all the music files live on there. The only thing the Tranquil PC does is play them and run the Touch Screen. <br />
<br />
So the plan was , music lives on Debian server, Tranquil PC boots Windows XP from CF and pulls music via wireless. I built the Tranquil PC using a latop hard drive as CF cards have finite writes before they die. Using a very cut down version of Windows XP ( I stripped pretty much EVERYTHING you don't need out - booted into 37Mb of RAM usage ) I set it to autorun the Touch Tone. <br />
<br />
To minimise writes on to the CF card I installed the EWF file system ( check <a href="http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/lpt/a/6278">http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/lpt/a/6278</a> ). EWF is a storage filter that protects volumes from unneeded writes, committing them at shutdown as opposed to all the time, you have to switch swap and system restore off, but they already were anyway. <br />
<br />
Once I was happy with the system running from the laptop hard drive I use Ghost to image it from the hard drive to a CF card ( use a CF to IDE adaptor ) and inserted it into the Tranquil PC :<br />
<br />
<img border=0 src="http://www.upuaut.net/jukebox/IMG_3761_resize.JPG"><br />
<br />
The wireless card goes on top :<br />
<br />
<img border=0 src="http://www.upuaut.net/jukebox/IMG_3762_resize.JPG"><br />
<br />
Powering on a totally silent PC is really wierd these days, this setup makes zero noise at all. You're not going to be running 3DMARK 2006 on it mind....<br />
Anyway after some fine tuning with the touch screen calibration and other bits and bobs :<br />
<br />
<img border=0 src="http://www.upuaut.net/jukebox/ttss1.jpg"><br />
<br />
Voila! All my music available at the touch of a button !<br />
<br />
<img border=0 src="http://www.upuaut.net/jukebox/ttss2.jpg"><br />
<br />
Shows the cover art whilst playing. <br />
<br />
<img border=0 src="http://www.upuaut.net/jukebox/ttss3.jpg"><br />
<br />
With a CD for scale.<br />
<br />
<img border=0 src="http://www.upuaut.net/jukebox/ttss4.jpg"><br />
<br />
The Tranquil PC at night ( since disconnected the blue LED - too bright at night ).<br />
<br />
<img border=0 src="http://www.upuaut.net/jukebox/ttss5.jpg"><br />
<br />
System in place, Tranquil PC on top left.<br />
<br />
So there you go one months toil which was surprisingly easy to implement. Hardest bit is making sure all your cover art and tags are correct. You could do this project with a laptop drive in the Tranquil and there is no reason why this set up couldn't be dropped in a car. <br />
Thanks for reading !</td></tr>
</td></tr></table>