DIY

If you have any questions on setting up a whole house audio system after reading this article, just visit the forums and I'll answer almost immediately.

Part 1 of the series is the hack version of whole house audio that can be put together basically for free. In Part 2 I'll explore how to do a more professional home audio solution without the need for satellite devices, and it will be done for right around $1000.

It's attractive to want to listen to your music in any room in the house. With the apparent death of the CD (that should get some comments about music quality) in favor of purchased downloads through iTunes and streaming of services like Pandora, wanting to listen to music stored on the computer without burning a CD is a reasonable request. Today I want to show you how to do this pretty much free, with stuff you have lying around the house.

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ecobee has recently announced a brand new model of the incredibly feature-rich ecobee Smart Thermostat called the ecobee Si at the AHR Expo in Chicago. Since it has been announced I find myself being constantly asked what features this new product would offer and how would it compare to the ecobee Smart Thermostat that is being sold today. First and foremost, I do not work for ecobee and I do not speak for them. I just happen to work for a company ( Eden Energy Equipment ) that has been selling them for some time and have direct contact with ecobee on their existing products and products in development.

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UPDATE: After a few months in service, it was clear the AMD board and CPU were not cutting it. MicroCenter had a crazy sale on i7 2600K quad-core 3.4GHz processors, so I picked one of those up. I put it on an ASRock H67M-ITX board and added a 220W PSU, the latter requiring more fabrication on the TiVO case. This setup flew and was then used for the review of TVersity on SmallNetBuilder.

In Part 1 of the Repurposing a TiVo Series 2 set of articles I walked through my plan of repurposing our TiVO Series2 as a home theater PC (HTPC). For those of you coming here on this page and not seeing Part 1, you're probably thinking, "but I just want to install Linux on my TiVo and use it that way". Give up on that thought. The TiVo hardware is proprietary (ie limited or no drivers) and CPU power is very low. I explored this route for quite sometime and eventually gave up. I eventually settled on gutting the TiVo, doing some fabrication to make it in to an HTPC, and then placing it inconspicuously in to our cabinet under the TV. What I found was that was easier said than done. Granted, I did do some things along the way that took a lot of time, but overall this was what I could describe as a moderately difficult project. Let's press on!

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