BeebRoom 2024

[atsampson]

What's the blue racking you're using there? I've wondered about getting something similar for my box farm...

[BeebMaster]

This is it:

https://www.bigdug.co.uk/clearance-spec ... -kit-p1404

It's actually cheaper with the current discount than when I bought it in 2021.

[atsampson]

Ooh, neat - and they do them in various sizes as well. Thanks!

[BeebMaster]

Yes, it's very good, and easy to assemble. Even I can do it without it all falling down in the middle of the night.

That size I have is big enough to have two "80-L" boxes on each shelf, and even two "110-L", but they do overhang slightly. In the picture I have the 3 bays that come as one purchase, with the two outer ones sideways on right up to the corners of the walls and the middle one is brought forward slightly to be flush with the front of the other two units, and that leaves a bit of space behind for the larger boxes to overhang on the middle unit. By a geospatial miracle, I can actually turn the smaller boxes at the front of the outer shelves to be able to pull them out to reach the boxes behind, which I was convinced wouldn't be possible.

The ones I currently have in the garage are from our old loft, I have about 7 or 8 more bays still in storage, which I need to empty and dismantle and transport!

[BigEd]

That’s subtle - you’ve got an ideal hide and seek hole behind the middle unit!?

[Mince]

Have a look at the TPLINK Deco mesh Wifi networks, I use these here , my Sky Hub is downstairs with a Deco attached to it, upstairs is another Deco to form the WIFI mesh, the Deco's also have LAN ports on them. More reliable than Powerline and saves having to relocate PSTN lines or run cables. ITVx is being streamed to the Sky Q box downstairs and im getting 67.20/18.47Mbps on a speedtest from the upstairs network.

I recently moved over to FTTP from FTTC. This is the first time the wireless and internal network performance in the house became an issue - I previously had 802.11ac with two APs to give solid 5GHz coverage over the whole house and a power line link running between them at about 120Mbit/s.

But the new service is 600Mbit/s symmetric so I had to move to 802.11ax and put in a bit of Cat6 between my office and Mrs Mince’s office (where the fibre comes in). If I’m near the APs, I can get well over 600Mbit/s internally easily (using iperf3) but as you stray away from the APs, including move downstairs, it can tail off. Only 802.11ax was giving me a solid 600Mbit/s coverage on wireless in all the important places. I don’t think a mesh would have given me that performance (you really need a tri-radio AP with a dedicated back haul and a really good link between them - I only get about 200Mbit/s on wireless between the two rooms where the APs are).

It was also annoying that my phone prioritises wireless standard over quality and strength of signal - the broadband provider gave me an 802.11ax AP as part of the install and I tried using one of my old 802.11ac APs but my phone kept connecting to the 802.11ax AP with the rubbish signal and getting well under 100Mbit/s, but that’s all sorted with a second 802.11ax AP.

[BeebMaster]

I have spent a couple of consecutive evenings in the last few days trying to understand how the telephone line actually comes into this house.

I can see it go from the telegraph pole across the street into the roof eaves on the side of the house, about two thirds of the way up to the top of the roof. Where it goes then is anybody's guess.

The master socket is in the downstairs spare bedroom (future overspill BeebRoom, but don't tell anybody) and has orange/white, orange, blue/white and blue wires. The orange ones are wired directly into the AB blades inside the master socket, and the blue ones aren't used.

This wire goes round the room under the carpet to the corner of the room where there is a telephone socket mounted on the skirting board. I thought they were connected until I realised from these latest investigations that the skirting board socket isn't connected to anything at all! The wire goes out through a hole in the wall into the meter cupboard under the stairs, round that little cubby hole and then behind some chipboard panelling and upwards.

So I can only think that this wire eventually goes out through the roof eaves to the telegraph pole, but I can't trace it any further.

To complicate matters, there is another telephone point in the dining room where the wire disappears down a hole in the floor next to the skirting board. This wire is different though, it has solid colours only, red, yellow, black, blue.

Then in the BeebRoom, telephone wire comes up through the floor at the skirting board half way round one wall, under the carpet right way round two other walls till it reaches the door, then goes under the door plate and along the landing wall for about 18 inches, then straight across the landing and disappears under the skirting board on the opposite landing wall. Behind there is a cubby hole but the wire disappears beyond the wall of the cubby hole into the roof space. I've been round there though a gap at the back of the cubby hole but it isn't possible to get to the other side of the wall where the wire disappears.

The reason I want to know is that it makes sense to move the Sky internet hub upstairs so that it's near all the technology, and I can run Cat5 cables directly from the hub instead of having to have powerline adapters downstairs and upstairs. It's been a lot better since I rearranged things a couple of weeks back but I would still like to eliminate the use of powerlines, or anything else which is going to degrade the internet strength, upstairs.

The idea was to find where the telephone wire comes in from the pole, which must be upstairs somewhere, and splice in a socket so I can connect directly to the Sky hub.

I decided to cut the wire in the BeebRoom, hoping that it wouldn't destroy the internet completely.

Nothing happened. That wire is similar to the wire I found in the dining room, except there are 6 wires of solid colours.

So I think what's in the BeebRoom and disappears into the roof space, and what's in the dining room, are part of the same old telephone wiring system which has nothing to do with the orange/blue wires which I can only trace from the master socket to the meter cupboard.

Most annoying.

[Mince]

I had lots of trouble working that out in our house, even working out which was the master socket, which turned out to be the most inconvenient one in the house (behind the kitchen door, nowhere near any power sockets, nor no shelf to put the router on or anything). I had to disconnect bits and tone them out to confirm all that.

When I first moved in, I put the router up in my office and wired some things into it but the broadband service was terrible. That was when I chased everything around and found out it went through the wall into the master bedroom, then up into the roof and joined onto lots of other spurs before going into the kitchen. I re-punched it down and that improved things a lot but it still wasn't perfect — I ended up moving the router to the master socket and sticking it on the windowsill and that gave me a nice solid 40Mbit/s.

I think there was a period in the '80s when the phone market was liberated and people added lots of phones, but before cordless phones really came in, so there was a lot of terrible cabling installed because DSL wasn't something.

All that said, our house is odd as it was built as a post office in 1986 with a flat upstairs and has a massive multicore phone cable coming in that presumably carried alarms and ISDN and stuff. It's also buried under the road, despite having a telegraph pole in the neighbour's garden, about 3m away for the house, that serves every other house in the area!

Its one claim to fame, though, is there's a picture of it being built on the Domesday disc and a caption describing that!

[BeebMaster]

Ooo I can look it up, what's the Areal Reference?

[Mince]

I don't know how you jump there but if you go to Cambridge and then zoom in on Oakington, just north west of the city and above the north end of the M11, then bring up the photos, it's the third (and last) one. Why there are three pictures of the village I don't know (and they're not exactly the best ones!).

[BeebMaster]

Here it is...

I made a video, but it's a bit jerky and there is no sound, as I am now using the Pi4 with VLC as my screen capture station instead of the desktop PC with OBS Studio:

https://www.beebmaster.co.uk/Downloads2 ... 1-5-24.mp4

The communities taking part in the Domesday Project were allocated a maximum of 3 photographs for their local area for inclusion on the Community Disc, and much of the text was written by schoolchildren. This excerpt amused me: "Children have ponies and holidays abroad". We had neither on t'other side of t'disc.

[BeebMaster]

BeebRoom is taking shape now:

I've been on a day-trip to the BeebVault today to continue with the dismantling of the shelving:

I put some in the BeebStockRoom but it was a very tight fit as the door frame just gets in the way:

I have a plan, but it's not being executed until V.E. Day.

[Multiwizard]

Here it is...

vlcsnap-2024-05-01-20h45m45s094.png

I made a video, but it's a bit jerky and there is no sound, as I am now using the Pi4 with VLC as my screen capture station instead of the desktop PC with OBS Studio:

https://www.beebmaster.co.uk/Downloads2 ... 1-5-24.mp4

The communities taking part in the Domesday Project were allocated a maximum of 3 photographs for their local area for inclusion on the Community Disc, and much of the text was written by schoolchildren. This excerpt amused me: "Children have ponies and holidays abroad". We had neither on t'other side of t'disc.

So no Domesday recordings anymore with your JVC DR-M150SEK player?...

[BeebMaster]

No, I haven't been using the JVC one for a while as it started eating every DVD I put in it, rendering them unusuable. I replaced it with a Sony DVD recorder which also has a hard drive, so for a while I was employing the same method of screen capture and recordings, recording initially to hard disc and then dubbing to DVD so I could extract frames or video in the PC. That was quite slow, however, as the dubbing was in real-time at the picture quality I wanted.

Also the Sony recorder developed a curious fault where it would sometimes freeze on playback of a video from the hard disc at the final frame. When dubbing it meant the dubbing continued and filled up the whole DVD, and even then control didn't return to the user so I had to reset the player to eject the disc. To stop this happening, I started to record about 15 seconds extra at the end of a video so I could then pause the video and stop the dubbing before it froze.

The Sony DVD recorder is still in use, but now I use its HDMI output to pass the Domesday Machine feed through to the HDMI-to-USB capture stick I have on the PC. Until the new BeebRoom came along, the stick was connected to my Ubuntu desktop PC using OBS Studio. Although I mainly do screen captures, I can record with that setup as well. I took cables from the BeebRoom to the office room where the PC is so I could continue the system, but it was very inconvenient not being able to see the PC at the same time as the screen being captured, so I rearranged things to use the Pi4 for screen capture.

Over the years several people said it was overkill to use OBS Studio just to capture screens from a Beeb, and as I couldn't install it on the Pi anyway, I looked for an alternative. In the end I plumped for reliable old VLC which I have been testing for two or three weeks and I think I've got it as I like it now for screenshots. The hardest part was binding the foot pedal keypresses to the right actions. The video was the first time I had tried to record a video in VLC from the capture stick input. It worked, but it wasn't showing the picture on the screen whilst recording, even though I ticked the "display output" option so I will have to experiment more with VLC for recording.

Later on last night, I made the first picture set under the new regime (about OSBYTE 170) which seemed to go very well, so I think finally I am pretty much back in service now!

[Multiwizard]

No, I haven't been using the JVC one for a while as it started eating every DVD I put in it, rendering them unusuable. I replaced it with a Sony DVD recorder which also has a hard drive, so for a while I was employing the same method of screen capture and recordings, recording initially to hard disc and then dubbing to DVD so I could extract frames or video in the PC. That was quite slow, however, as the dubbing was in real-time at the picture quality I wanted.

Also the Sony recorder developed a curious fault where it would sometimes freeze on playback of a video from the hard disc at the final frame. When dubbing it meant the dubbing continued and filled up the whole DVD, and even then control didn't return to the user so I had to reset the player to eject the disc. To stop this happening, I started to record about 15 seconds extra at the end of a video so I could then pause the video and stop the dubbing before it froze.

The Sony DVD recorder is still in use, but now I use its HDMI output to pass the Domesday Machine feed through to the HDMI-to-USB capture stick I have on the PC. Until the new BeebRoom came along, the stick was connected to my Ubuntu desktop PC using OBS Studio. Although I mainly do screen captures, I can record with that setup as well. I took cables from the BeebRoom to the office room where the PC is so I could continue the system, but it was very inconvenient not being able to see the PC at the same time as the screen being captured, so I rearranged things to use the Pi4 for screen capture.

Over the years several people said it was overkill to use OBS Studio just to capture screens from a Beeb, and as I couldn't install it on the Pi anyway, I looked for an alternative. In the end I plumped for reliable old VLC which I have been testing for two or three weeks and I think I've got it as I like it now for screenshots. The hardest part was binding the foot pedal keypresses to the right actions. The video was the first time I had tried to record a video in VLC from the capture stick input. It worked, but it wasn't showing the picture on the screen whilst recording, even though I ticked the "display output" option so I will have to experiment more with VLC for recording.

Later on last night, I made the first picture set under the new regime (about OSBYTE 170) which seemed to go very well, so I think finally I am pretty much back in service now!

Thanks for all this...

(perhaps if possible) Any pics of your capturing hardware/device(s)?...

Thanks in advance.

[BeebMaster]

Yes, absolutely. Eventually there will be a picture of everything.

My initial set about the Sony DVD recorder is here:

https://www.beebmaster.co.uk/SonyRDR-HXD770.html

There are a couple more sets coming up, hopefully in the June update. Then I have a set called "Screen Capture 2023" made in August 2023, but there are 287 picture sets before it, so it will be a while before it appears.