Adidas4275's living room home theater 4 day build

Okay guys my wife and I recently bought our first home and being the [H]ard member that I am I needed to build my own home theater. Our home is a 1900 sqf 4 bed, 2 full bath with a 2 car garage. The living room, dining room and kitchen are all one open space, which is very applealing but really difficult for light control for a projector.

I did my "homework" for about 3 months and came up with my list of equipment, most of it had to be purchase since we came from a 600 sqf 1 bedroom appartment.

Equipment List:

Projector: Epson Home Cinema 720 from Visual Apex (free extra lamp from rebate)
Projector Mount: Visual Apex Universal Projector Mount AV-818U
Speakers: 5.1 (MIA is the sub, still needs to be purchased) All from "The Speaker Company" they had good reviews over at AVSfourm for the price.
Front L R and C are IW-D5 LCR pack $159
Rear 2 are IC-5 - Pair 5.25" $39.99 pair
AVR: Onkyo 605 bought for $200 off of AVS fourm

HTPC:
CPU: AMD X2 BE-2400 45w 2.3GHZ (Friday will be replaced with an X2 245)
Motherboard: Foxconn A7GM-S
RAM: 2GB DDR2 667 2 Sticks
HDD: WD Black 640gb
ODD: LG Blu-Ray reader
PSU: Antec Smartpower
GPU: ATI 4830 Silent (motherboard doesnt do 5.1/7.1 over HDMI)


WHS:
Case: Norco 4020
CPU: Intel Celeron E1400
Motherboard: Biostar G31-M7 TE (CPU and Motherboard were bought for $50 at a Frys)
HDD: 6 750gb WD7500AAKS on Highpoint RR 2300 Raid 5 with 1 as hotspare
2 750gb WD7500AAKS on motherboard as OS and storage pool drive
Drives run at 47*C with ambient at 30*C
4TB of Useable Space with RAID5 and a hotspare
PSU: Antec 650w Earthwatt
STB: Motorola STB HD comcast box (soon to be tapped into for recording via either FireSTB, ATI Cable Card (with hack) or PVR-HD)
All speaker wiring is CL2 in-wall rated 12ga wiring from monoprice, it took 200ft for my install.
HDMI cables are also monoprice: 2 6 ft and 1 25ft

All components are in the closet of the next bedroom, I will either build my own rack or buy a MA rack, depending on the $$ flow soon.....

And I have a logitech 890 RF remote that will be here on friday ( i was looking at the 900, but $400 vs $150 for basically the same function)

Here are some Pics:

My little sister who is around 5'1" for reference






























I know I still need to level the PJ, my father took back his ladder and I have not bought one yet!!!! Soon. This build took 4 days from start to finish


Sorry for the crappy iphone 3g pics, when blinds come i will post some pics with a real camera


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UPDATE 1/8/2010
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Okay so i started the long and expensive jouney into home automation. I recently purchased Home Seer Pro (they had a sale) and I got 2 ELO USB glass capacitive touchscreens to mount on/in the wall.

I found the touchscreens on ebay for $40 a piece (buy it now 8% CB) + shipping so I bought 2 (one is not being used and will be installed later)


I decided on homeseer for a couple reasons..... it is DIY/end user friendly, it has been around for a while, it has an active forum and community, many, many, many plugins and it is completely customizable.....

So i spent about 10 hrs creating some touchscreen with HStouch and linking them to WMP on my WHS which was a little bit of a pain to get installed and a weather screen. So far i have found HStouch and homeseer pro to be very useable and because of a good forum it is easy to find answers to easy problems.

I bought 5 homepro z-wave light switches that were suppost to be here yesterday but have not arrived and will be controlled via the touch pannel.

I installed the pannel with normal 12-2 romex a new work box and a plug. I didnt get any pics of drywalling the inside, mainly because i suck at drywall and it looks bad but no one will ever see it as it is behind the screen. The screen is mounted in the wall and it sticks out about 3/4" similar to a picture frame.

I have a CL2 monoprice 35' VGA cable and a set of monoprice USB--> CATx extenders for the touchscreen

It is in the livingroom/dinningroom/kitchen open space and is next to the hallway leading to the master suite.

Okay here are some pics:
so i am switching to live drive for hosting and this is the 3rd time posting these..... dumb live drive and its web links that dont link to the photo and the preview (small res) photos you cannot link to either....























Once the lightswitches arrive I will finish the lighting control screen and have all the lights in that main room controlled via the touchscreen and 7MC state.

Future Upgrades:

Z-wave thermostate
motion/temp sensors
z-wave light switches in each room
z-wave door lock
z-wave door/window sensors
install 2nd touchscreen in the hallway near the garage
ip webcam with motion detection for the front door


Program homeseer to work how i want it

The Built in is 118"x80"

screen is a 100" Vmax2 Elite screen



No i do not, I am hoping that I am able to build a temp wood rack for my stuff this weekend and then eventually buy a nice MA rack....

my closet is too small to mount the rack perpindicular to the space so I will be making some sort of custom rack.... I was dreaming of having a slide out rotating MA rack.... but that might just be dreaming...





Yeah my STB is hot! with that Onkyo 605, it is hotter than my WHS and my HTPC put together.... it will be taken care of by a temp wood rack with lots of fans



i bought stain grade 20" deep birch from Lowes.... it is glulam.

Then I primed all the wood, prior to building, and then painted with a semi-gloss white...... it's the paint we have on our baseboards in our home. We will be framing in all the windows in the house with the same trime that the media cabinet was trimed in and also installed crown molding over winter break.

resized pics

yeah the recess was there and the cabinet company that did the rest of the house wanted close to $6,000 to build something that was 10'x6' to fit in there. it cost us about $500 for the cabinet. (so far)


Yeah, when i designed it I used a 52" pioneer plasma as a reference. So it will fit a wall mounted 52" TV in there. There is already cat6, HDMI, RG6 and power to the area. right now its all behind plywood, but if we ever wanted to add a TV we could.

Right now we dont watch enough TV to justify it. The Epson 720 and Screen was only $1300 for both, so it was a "in stead of" purchase at this point.


Thank, it took me a while to draw out all the plans to make sure everything fit and looked how I wanted it to. Then it was just up to me actually build it.



honestly the WAF was so high on this project it was great. My wife loves that the TV is not the center of attention when people come over.... well until we want it to be.... then it is not just the center of attention but everone stops what they were doing to watch.

the first 5 mins of Fast and the Furrious 3 is great to watch in 5.1 on a 100" HD screen

Thanks, comming from a mod that it cool


Thanks... as for the paint... my little sister needed something to do and we were not sure if we wanted a wood backing or the wall to show through. So we painted it, knowing that if we stuck with the wood backing your wouldnt see it anyways. Also we knew we wanted to paint the bullnose so there is clean paint line between the trim molding and the wall.

yeah it was extra paint but that is okay

it is setup for a LCD, LED or plasma 52" on the shelf. So if day time viewing isnt up to par with it being a living room and not really light controlled then i will buy a TV

we just got blinds today so will will post some new pics tomorrow with a real camera of the image with the blind open and closed.

thanks, thats why i posted.... be sure to post pics of your build... i got a lot of my ideas from othre posts on here and hardforum

I am using a harmony 890 and everytime I switch from TV to HTPC it tells the screen to go down.... which it already is, so i think that over time will stress the motor and cause it to burn out..

I was thinking a 12v wire from the PJ to the screen would be better...

ah... back into the attic at 100*C outside

also I ordered a IR power switch for my HTPC so that I could actually turn the HTPC on and off and no sleep states...
http://www.simerec.com/

we will see how well it works, I am still trying to get my WAF higher..

yeah, not waht i am looking for.... i am trying to prolong the longevity of my equipment and increase WAF.... that only increases longevity... it definately does not make it easier to operate...


I think I am going to run a 12v on swtich from the PJ to the Screen..... I got mono 1/4" jack extenders to extend the 890 IR blasters to the PJ so you dont have to point the remote at the PJ anymore.... i just need to get the energy to go up in the attic.... living in the Fresno,CA sucks for attic work

it doesnt know, it send the signal again... I can hear the motor click on.

also even though my Epson PJ is on HDMI it changes the input to HDMI again.... it takes around 1.5 sec to get the signal again when switching....

I sent a tech request to logitech and they reconfigured my settings for the PJ.....

I had to manually add the screen command to the activies as well... should it automatically know to put the screen down or up?

recently built a temp "rack" and added a tripplite UPS (not pictured)

and I just got a Dell Keyboard, Trackball, 15" LCD 1U console from ebay for $99 shipped that I will be installing soon



also added the IR switch i linked above and it works great... the harmony remote can now power on (from full off state) and off the HTPC and with that 640gb back drive its boot is fast enough to save the WAF.... a SSD would be better

here is my review on that IR switch
http://www.missingremote.com/index.p...=4113&Itemid=1

havent done anything with it yet. I will be climbing into the actic soon to run ir blasters to the screen and PJ so that the remote will work with RF for the 2 devices.... then i dont have to point it at the screen.

when i do I will redo the screen programming. I think i added it as an applicance since it showed up with the manufacturer and product under that category.

Ill post my results when i update it..... thanksgiving break probably...

thanks