Structured Wiring

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I helped my brother run wire when he was building his house. It was all for his structured wiring. All these cables feed to 3 large patch panels, which you see above. He is still in the process of punching them down. But it will be very impressive when he is done. We also ran some of this six-in-one speed wrap, snake cable. I’m trying to remember all that it has in it. I think it’s 2 coaxial, 1 fiber optic, 2 telephone, and one ethernet. These link up to panels in the walls. There you can hook into any of the input types. It’s very nice. But the most exciting thing for me right now is the speaker/audio setup that he has. We ran a ton of speaker wiring all over the house. In each room that houses the in-ceiling speakers, he has put in these really cool controls. The picture isn’t the greatest, but these tiny controls allow him to select the audio source, turn off the power to the speakers, turn up the volume, and change the color of the backlighting. He currently has sirius radio and an mp3 server piping through the audio sources. He will eventually have 4 sources. That right – he can choose a different audio source in each room! Talk about sweet. But my favorite thing about all of it was the mp3 solution he has instituted. We were looking for a good solution. We looked on the linux side because, well, it’s free. We looked at XMMS and some of its plugins. But he finally settled on MPD, or the music player daemon. One of the reasons he settled on this one was the amount of different clients for it. There are ones for linux, OSX, and pocket pc. Check out the pic of his iPaq. From this pocket PC he can select songs, add them to the playlist, increase and decrease volume, and change connection settings. It’s a very slick solution. Hats off to the work bro!

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