HTPC from old trash

It has long been itching to build a home media center, and, concurrently, a file storage. New to buy did not give a toad, I had to collect from what was. And it was ... (as always, traffic !!!)

- the old computer shabby for years
- a wish
- free time
- some cash

1. IRON

Started by searching for a suitable case. An empty case was purchased from the Technics SL-PG580A CD player on the market for a symbolic sum of 300 evergreens.
')


Then I had to sweat and saw off all unnecessary metal protrusions inside the case, of which there were plenty. The hacksaw and sledgehammer did the trick. Things are easy - to place inside the motherboard, power supply and hard drive.

There were no problems with the motherboard. In the metal "floor" of the case, drilled a couple of holes and put them on the screws, having previously placed a polyethylene insulator. The back wall cut out of plastic.



The hard drive that came in the kit was no good, for it had a capacity of about 30Gb. A 500 GB hard drive was chosen for the purchase, and here the first ambush was waiting for me. Large-scale IDE screws haven't been delivered for a long time (or they cost an astronomical amount), and SATA does not support the motherboard . I had to buy more PCI> SATA controller from a well-known noname manufacturer ...



... which, as it turned out, did not want to load the system disk. That is, the BIOS did not pick it up at all. The forums blamed the Chinese, who "forgot" to pour the firmware into the controller. A little googling and flashback BIOS motherboard fixed the situation. The hard drive has perfectly “risen” to its rightful place.



Metal bracket for fasteners was pulled out of the old system unit.



From the global, it remained to provide the whole business with food. In order to fit a standard power supply into the case, I had to remove the entire metal casing from it. ATTENTION! To do this is extremely dangerous, since now high voltage contacts are not protected.



The result is IT



As you can see, everything sits tight enough. DVD drive is missing. It remains only to make everything turn on from the button on the case.



and the processor did not overheat (ventilation from above).



Not very aesthetically pleasing, but practical. And a few more photos in the end.









The boom of Boeing taking off did not suit me. Unfortunately, the motherboard does not know how to control the speed of the fans, so I inserted a pair of Zalman resistors. It has become much more comfortable. Below is a picture in the interior.

2. SHELL

Considered many options. Looked closely at XBMC , Elisa (now Moovida), Freevo , settled on MythTV . Most liked XBMC, but the integrated video card was inappropriate in this case option.
I installed the Mythbuntu = Ubuntu + MythTV distribution. There were no underwater stones.
Initial configuration was performed using Webmin, which I already wrote about in my article .

3. REMOTE CONTROL PANEL

I don’t have an infrared receiver for the remote, but there is a bluetooth usb adapter and a SonyEricsson phone that can easily replace the remote. In Mythbuntu, in the settings for bluetooth connections, we add the phone to trusted devices (via bluez), and we upload a HID profile to the phone, you can find it on the Internet. For example, here .

By the way, recalling those times when HID only appeared in the phones (I had the SonyEricsson T310 ), it was impossible to find ready-made profiles. Rather, those that were, looked terrible. After sitting a bit, I created several profiles myself.





What was my surprise when after five years I discovered them in various forums dedicated to this topic!
Remains "source" of these blanks. I post it just in case, maybe someone will need it. Archive, size 798.4 KB. File Listing:



depositfiles.com/files/vg79jcdss
rapidshare.com/files/293842533/HID-PWD.zip.html
www.sendspace.com/file/1lexyo
new1.flyupload.com/files/view/cxSfsrmhBIqmZelmkO7e

4. CONCLUSION

That seems to be all. What happened, has been working for half a year already, and for the time being he is satisfied. Although the eyes are already looking at ION.