Wednesday, January 4, 2017

Projectors I'm Considering

The over $1,000 Crop


Panasonic Home PT-AE8000
Panasonic Home
PT-AE8000
(remove)
Epson Home Cinema 5040UB
Epson
Home Cinema 5040UB
(remove)
Epson Home Cinema 5030UB
Epson
Home Cinema 5030UB
(remove)

The under $1,000 Crop


LG Electronics PF1500
LG Electronics
PF1500

BenQ HT2150ST
BenQ
HT2150ST

My Current Projector


Optoma HD180
Optoma
HD180

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Raspberry Pi

I've been playing around with the Raspberry Pi and have been quite pleased.  There are many projects out there for true DIY types, but I've opted to use some of the easy to implement builds (so far).

Media Servers and Clients

RasPlex - a Plex Client

    • RasPlex is a Plex Client that is used as a media streamer that you connect to your HDMI compatible device (e.g., TV).
    • It is an alternative to an Apple TV, Amazon FireTV, Roku, etc.
    • So far it has performed very well.
    • Controling your RasPlex
      • Smart Phone with Plex App
      • TV Remote for a TV with HDMI CEC capability
      • Raspberry Pi Remote
      • Raspberry Pi keyboard and mouse

OSCM 

    • OSCM (Open Source Media Center) is a media center implementation built on Linix.  There is a specific implementation for the Raspberry Pi
    • It consists of Kodi on top of Linix
    • Benefits
      • Can play local media on a USB Memory stick or external USB hard drive, so not network connection is required

Plex Server

NAS

OMV - Open Media Vault

    • Open Media Vault is a platform for easily creating a NAS with an HTML GUI.
    • Article: How to build your own Raspberry Pi NAS - February 29, 2016
    • Here's setup instructions.  The article above does not tell you how to set it up.  This one goes through it step-by-step.

DIY - Do It Yourself using standard features of Linx


WIN32 Disk Imager

  • This software creates the image on the SD memory card from a downloaded image file

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Setting up a media system

My System

Other Handy Software to use
  • Kodi (was XBMC) - alternative to PLEX
  • VLC - to view video files
  • Handbrake - to transcode files
  • Plex Export - export your library to an HTML page
  • Rename My TV Series - another way to renane your TV Show files - I have not used it 
  • Media Info - inspect contents of .mkv files to see what codecs are used, etc.
Articles

Saturday, January 17, 2015

New Flight Controller - PIXHAWK

Looking at getting the PIXHAWK controller.  HobbyKing has a version of it for way less than 3DR.

3DR Pixhawk



LED Lighting Choices

Bought some 3520 LED strip at the hobby shop today.  Costs $7 per foot.  Came home and found same stuff online for $8 for 16.4 feet.  Oops.