From time to time my fingers start to itch. When that happens I just have to build something… now it is time again.
For a while now I have been irritating my self on those silly radio shows that I have to wake up to. And ideas of building a wake up device have started to crystallize.
Readers of my blog know how I tried to build a music workstation, and how I found out that the computer I used turned up to be to weak.
Well… I still have that computer, and the idea of a multimedia enabled alarm clock is forming.
Design idea
a 17″ LCD monitor
a mATX FS motherboard
some 500 Mb memory
a 1GHz celeron processor
a wireless KBD
a PS2 mouse pad
and a 1Gb CF card with an IDE adapter
…lets build an multimedia alarm clock!
The LCD monitor, beeing salvaged from my work, have four holes on the back. I think they are supposed to be used for a wall mount or something like that. I used them to mount a simple slimline chassis. I had it made for about 75 SKr.
I mounted the chassis on distances so that the cooling outlet from the monitor would not be blocked. I drilled holes for standard motherboard mounting distances and mounted the motherboard as in any normal computer case. I then glued plastic “rails” made from a CD case on the power supply and pushed the rails in the AGP and PCI slot connectors. Making the power supply “piggy backed” on the motherboard.
The CF-card and the IDE adapter is located under the ribbon cable. And as you can see there is plenty of room between the power supply and the MB for cooling.
Here it is, all hooked up and “ignited”. I used double CPU coolers to get enough passive cooling. The slimline case i had made also have a perforated cover that I have removed to take the photos. With the cover on, it looks almost as a commercial product. Well… a little bulkier.
As you can see, one of the problems that arises is the length of the normal cables. I yet have to get very short cables for monitor (both VGA and power) and sound. I also haven’t integrated my wireless kbd reciever. It is supposed to be mounted to the left of the CPU cooler.
I installed the latest version of SLAX and configured it heavily đ
The use of the “toram” cheat code is used to minimize CF wear and to make the system nice and fast.
The monitor have built in speakers that sound far better that my old clock radio and the KDE desktop is configured to be “fool proof”. Only a handful icons are used. One for gmplayer, one for juk and one for the KDE settings panel. If it is possible, the mouse pad is just temporary.
A numpad keyboard is used to make the remote control. I bought a cheap but good looking numpad and modified it with “the brain” of an old wireless keyboard. Then I remapped some of the keys in X so that i get the functions i want on board the numpad. The TAB key and the SPACE key for example. Here is a picture from the inside of the numpad.
The gutted numpad leaves just enough room for the wireless transmitter and a 3 volt battery. The transmitter is the same model as my (tucked away) wireless keyboard. So I can “sync in” a normal keyboard for maintainance.
So what can I do with my MediaClock?
* It is sharp on time because it uses NTP to correct itself
* It plays the music I want to wake up to, via USB or network
* It plays movies so that I can watch film in bed
* It is online so that I can stream news and shoutcast radio if I like
* It is a skype phone, used to communicate both in the house and like a normal phone
So are there any disadvantages? Cause there is, 17″ is to big. But it is the only left over monitor i have. If you decide to make a MediaClock, rather use a smaller monitor.
Hope I could give you some inspiration…
*** UPDATE ***
The 17″ screen is now exchanged with an 15″. That doesn’t sound to big a change, but believe me it is. MUCH nicer with that smaller monitor on my sideboard. Apart from that the media clock have served me extreamly well. It has only failed once after a power outage. For some reason it didn’t mount the music volume when it came up, so the alarm didn’t “play”. After that it have conducted well, even after several power outages.
*** UPDATE ***
Today I upgraded the system on the mediaclock to SLAX 6.1.2. I also added a script that turns on xclock at a given time interval, seven o’clock and one hour forward right now. That idea came from my wife who wanted to know the time while getting ready for the day. The media clock continues to perform very well, and by now I havent had a more reliable alarm clock on my sideboard.
