Jukebox

A few years ago I decided that I had had enough of changing CDs, I had an old P100 lying around so I set about turning it into a jukebox. I brought an IrMan so I could receive control information from standard infrared handsets. I wrote a windows service and client COM objects in C++ to allow me to recieve button pushes as COM events in software on any machine attached to my LAN. I wrote a COM wrapper round the popular XAudio MP3 libraries again in C++, and finally I put together a front end in VB so that I could see what it was doing.
Remember at this time it was just an old P100, connected to the second input on my nomal monitor, this setup was never really what I wanted, it saved me changing CDs but it was too big, looked and sounded (fan noise etc.) like a PC. What I really wanted was something that could sit in stack with my normal HiFi kit and not look out of place.
So when VIA launch the Mini-ITX boards they looked perfect and I set about putting together what I actually wanted.
I started by buying all the necessary bits and asembling it with no case.

Parts list

EDEN EPIA 800

128MB PC133

Seagate 60GB quiet HDD

150W 1U server powersupply

4" TFT screen (Maplin)

IrMan

Parts for parallel port relay board - more on that later

Parts for S-Video to Composite adapter

Blue neon string

TFT Screen

The screen is a low res 4" TFT screen from Maplin (ukp130), the input is PAL.

The IrMan

This is a great piece of kit, it is far more sensitive than any normal TV or HiFi, connects to the serial port and can be placed discretly out of the way somewhere.

Screen control

The machine is running Windows XP and is designed to be left on all the time - after all who wants to have to wait for their HiFi to boot up!
As a result I decided it was necessary to have a way of turning off the screen and neon lighting, at the same time I decided it would be nice to be able to switch to an external TV display sometimes - makes it easier to use from across the room at parties.
The upshot of this was building a little circuit board that plugs into the parallel port and allows me to control 2 relays.

The Ports

Click for labeled picture

The Build

Unfortunatly my old camera broke just before the actual build phase so I have no pictures I it being assembled. The case construction is MDF sprayed black and left unpolished to give a slightly matte effect. The inside is covered with akasa acoustic damping mat to reduce noise.

Software

These pictures are screen shots taken via VNC

Since the original software I have move to being a .NET C# developer and when it came time to improve the software I decided to rewrite the front end in in .NET.
The IrMan control software is still the old COM C++ Windows sevice and client objects used via Interop.
I still use the COM Wrapper round the XAudio MP3 libraries again via Interop and have now extended it to provide spectrum analysis as well as the basic playback functions.
The front end is then written as a WinForms application in C#.

The controls

Until now I had configured it to use the spare buttons on my Sherwood handset, but this meant I was the only one that knew how to control it so I decided to take an old handset I had around an rebadge it properly.

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