Ethernet over Powerline – not as good as I had hoped!

April 20th, 2009 | Posted by ProfFalken in Home Automation | Home Cinema | Linux | networking | Open-Source - (0 Comments)

Just a quick post…

In the last two parts of this series I stated I’d be using Ethernet over Powerline (aka HomePlug) as the backbone for my media system.

I currently own two 14Mbps units and tests have rapidly shown that this is nowhere near good enough.  Looks like I’ll have to upgrade to the 200Mbps units once I get paid and hope that it makes a difference.  If it doesn’t, I think I’m going to have to go down the route of Wireless-AP’s flashed with OpenWRT and acting as bridge devices to get the DHCP/TFTP working for the media directors.

Hmmm, PXE over a flakey wireless CX – not good… :o(

Whole-house networking without honeycombing walls

April 11th, 2009 | Posted by ProfFalken in Home Automation | Home Cinema | Life | Linux | networking - (4 Comments)

In part one of this series, I outlined LinuxMCE and how amazing it was providing Home Cinema, VoIP Telephony, CCTV and home automation in one system for the price of a download and a few hours work.  This article will help those who, like me, live in rented accomodation or cannot ask their local electrician to come and channel cabling ducts into the walls for some other reason, yet need to have a solid network cable running throughout the house.

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Home Automation and whole-house media on the cheap…

April 11th, 2009 | Posted by ProfFalken in Home Automation | Home Cinema | Life | Linux | Open-Source - (2 Comments)

I’ve been playing around with Home Automation and trying to get my audio/video around the house without honey-combing the walls for the last few years with varying degrees of luck and in this time I’ve looked at a number of solutions including proprietary hardware (too expensive!!), Microsoft Windows Media Centre Edition (expensive and it runs on Windows…) and MythTV/Music Player Daemon (free, but not always the easiest to get it working!

Two years ago, I found Pluto Home – a commercial solution that had an open-source base and ran on Debian.  I played with it for a bit as the feature set was amazing (TV, Video, Audio and CCTV anywhere in the house as well as integrated VoIP telephony and some really cool stuff) but I ran out of spare time to explore it further.  I’ve started to look into Home Automation and Media again and this time, instead of using Pluto Home, I’ve decided to settle for LinuxMCE. It’s based on pluto home and Ubuntu and there’s been a lot of development since I was using Pluto…

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