> Can you elaborate a bit on the IR side of what you did?
> I have an unused room in my house that I'd like to
> turn into a central media source. Put all the
> stereo/sat receivers/etc in one place and
> route signals to whatever TV in the house I want.
I put in a bunch of wire from the attic panel to the motor-control panel
at the lower end of the skylight, bent the IR receiver inside the panel
back slightly, put a 9-cent IR LED on the end of the wire and laid it
down next to the receiver. I think it was 18/2 to the skylights, I had
a bunch of 18/2 and some 20/4 shielded and I just basically used
whatever I had laying around, I think for most of it Cat5 would have
worked fine though the specs for receiver-to-distribution-block calls
for something heavier.
The IR LEDs are a lot cheaper than an $8 emitter, not to mention more
compact and you don't have to worry about cutting and soldering the
featherweight wire they use for the head of the thing (or trying to put
a 1/8 phone jack on the end of the wire then bundling three feet of
emitter wire into the skylight control panel.)
All of this, as well as the IR wiring (in-from-receiver and
out-to-emitter) from three or four other potential stereo locations
(living room, office/future media room, master bedroom, shop - hey, I
wired the place, I know what matters to me) in the house comes back to
this panel, where I've got a distribution block for each room (well,
only two are wired right now...) then a 'master' block that serves the
skylights. As things stand right now the IR inputs in the
living/dining/kitchen space only goes to emitters in the living room
plus all the skylights, the IR inputs in the MBR only go to MBR outputs
plus all the skylights, etc.
We're not audiophiles/videophiles particularly, so what we've got for
entertainment equipment is basically old stuff, and this all pretty much
works for what we want, and since everything's wired centrally I can
always change it.
The next step is to bridge the two different sets of light controls and
wrap IR control into them.
John.
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