Bare Metal Media Centre

March 29, 2016 by Anool Mahidharia 8 Comments

Sometimes, along comes a build that is simple and bare, and yet exemplifies “hacking” – an art form that uses something in a way in which it was not originally intended. We’ve featured a few Raspberry Pi builds, but this one is less about the Pi and more about putting the rest of the hardware nicely together. [Garage Tech] built this Raspberry-Pi Stand and the end result is brilliant.

It is nothing more than a metal book holder – the kind you are likely to pick up a pair for a few bucks at a charity shop or flea market. He was lucky to also snag a JBL On Stage IIIP Speaker Dock for cheap. Quickly spotting an opportunity, he decided to put together an OpenELEC based media centre using his bounty. Having made up his mind, he needed a couple of other parts to make sure this build looked, and sounded, good. An iQuadio Pi DAC+ , the Pi-DAC+ case from ModMyPi which comes with all the necessary hardware, and the official DSI touch screen.

With all of the stuff on hand, the rest of the build involved a short time at the workbench drilling some holes and slots in the aluminium book holder plate to mount the Pi-DAC case and the display. He drilled the holes and slots such that he can fix the display on either side. Along the way, he discovered an interesting issue regarding the display orientation – check it out. The final result is a nice looking media centre that sits proudly on top of his audio rig.

Custom HTPC And Home Media Server

October 7, 2013 by Marsh 21 Comments

[Benoit Frigon]’s builds are a tribute to tidiness: both his HTPC and media server are elegant creations packed full of features. He has quite the knack for clean builds in this form factor; his PBX server was met with high praise earlier this summer.

For the HTPC, [Benoit] gutted and cleaned an old DVR case and modified it to house a Mini-ITX board. He added standoff mounts to support the motherboard, then sketched up a template for the IO shield as a guide for cutting the back panel. The front of the DVR case originally had a 4-digit 7-segment display and a few simple buttons. Though he kept the original button layout, [Benoit] chose to replace the segment displays with a 20×2 character LCD. The new display is controlled via a python script on the HTPC, which runs an OpenElec Linux distro with XBMC 12.0.

The HTPC’s hard drive bay is a bit lighter these days, because [Benoit] decided to migrate his media storage to a separate server. Inside the new home media server is yet another Mini-ITX motherboard with an embedded Atom N2800 that runs Ubuntu Server. Live television streams via a WinTV HVR-2550 TV tuner and TVHeadend software. The case originally suspended the tuner from the IO bracket on the back (and nowhere else), which left the rest of the card dangerously unsupported inside. [Benoit] solved the problem by building an additional aluminum bracket that firmly holds both the PCIe riser and the tuner. Check out both builds’ pages for downloadable templates, software details and bill of materials.