Review: Google Chromecast

New toys

For Christmas my parents gave me their old TV, since moving into my first house I've been using a computer monitor as a TV. Which hasn't been that bad if I'm honest, the distance from my sofa to "TV" was never more than 3m so when watching on a 22 inch screen even full HD video looked lovely and was pleasing to watch.

Out with the old

That said, I was using a computer monitor as my TV, clearly that means that I had a computer set up nearby driving it, the problem with a computer driving what you watch is that you have to get up and operate said computer because computers usually don't have an interface to them that lends itself for operation from your arm chair (does anyone under the age of 80 even have an arm chair these days?)

The reason it doesn't is that your typical computer is equipped with a keyboard and mouse, which even when wireless isn't desirable because they are precision tools but when interacting with a display at a range of 3m+ precision isn't what you need.

What you need is something simple and robust that is independent of range. Once solution is to implement the Google Chromecast and use your mobile device(s) such as your smart phone or tablet as a remote control.

Unboxing

As of January 2015, the Google Chromecast is on sale for £30. Until the end of January, the purchase of a Chromecast also has four offers:

• £15 of Google play credit
• X-men on Google movies
• 90 days of Google play music subscription
• Three months now TV

The current package makes for an exceptionally good deal. The X-Men movie is worth £2.49, 90 days on Google play is worth £20.96 (3 off £6.99) and finally the now TV subscription is worth £29.97 (3 off £9.99).

The Chromecast comes in a very neat, simple glossy cardboard box.

The outer sleeve is removed to reveal another similar cardboard box. Opening this box gives you the first glimpse of the Chromecast dongle.

Underneath the dongle tray are the final three components to make the Chromecast work (and two of these are optional).

The Chromecast is powered over USB: the lead approximately 1.5m long when fully stretched out, which means that you should have no problem reaching any USB port on your TV regardless of the HDMI port location. For slightly older TV's (like mine) without a USB port, an AC-DC plug is provided.

The final item is a HDMI Extender. This is really useful for giving you a bit of extra length to reach your mains plug, also if the area around your HDMI port is quite congested due to the design of the TV, it again gives you some breathing room for the dongle (like you can see in the picture below, there was very little room directly below the HDMI ports due to the shaping of the TV). But its primary purpose is to boost the Wi-Fi signal the dongle recieves. Having used the dongle when there has been high internet traffic causing a bandwidth issue for iPlayer and witnessing the drop in resolution during playback, I can say it is unpleasant on the eye to see such a drastic change unexpectedly. So to ensure there is no bandwith issue, I use the HDMI extender and would recommend that you also use it.

When the Chromecast Dongle is installed with the HDMI Extender, and with the USB powering lead plugged in this is how it looks on my TV (only has two HDMI inputs).

Now that the Chromecast is installed, the next steps are all about getting it registered on to your Wi-Fi network. It should be noted that if you want to install a custom ROM on your Chromecast, now's a good time to do that.

When you are ready, you'll need to switch your TV to the correct HDMI input to use the Chromecast as a source. You'll need to download the Chromecast app to your phone, tablet or computer to get started.

In the same way that you pair your phone with your car using bluetooth, the next few steps involve pairing your Chromecast to the Wi-Fi network and record it on your Google Account.

Once the Chromecast is on the network, it will do an update. These updates can be about 1 GB so this may take a few minutes depending on your broadband connection.

The Chromecast will automatically reboot itself and apply the updates so you should eventually be greeted with a screen like this:

Now you can start casting. You can cast from desktop using Chrome (once you've installed the Google Cast plug-in), cast from your android device (you've already installed the Chromecast app) and then you can cast within an app such as iPlayer or Netflix to beam your video to your TV. For the latest list of apps that you can use with your Chromecast check the Chromecast website.

It should be noted that the video stream isn't going via your tablet (or phone), a dedicated connection is setup between the Chromecast and your Wi-Fi. So you can then continue to use your tablet to watch whatever you want. I've found that if you cast from Chrome on your computer, you can't close Chrome or turn the computer off, it seems some connection is still maintained.

Final thoughts (on the extras)

Having had access to Google Play Music for 90 days I've found that for the most part it's been unused. The biggest reason for this for me is that I don't have a large data allowance (only 500 Mb), for someone with a 3+ GB allowance that could use it on the go. The NowTV subscription is in same boat. It wasn't made as clear as it could have been, but what you actually get is 90 days Entertainment pack access. The entertainment pack gives you access to TV shows, such as Game of Thrones, but not access to films which is slightly disappointing. Furthermore I found that the collection available whilst broad didn't have anything particularly impressive until Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead came out. So in my opinion I can't recommend NowTV - I find Netflix has a better selection.

Final thoughts (on the dongle)

One sentence : I bloody love it. The ability to just fling whatever at the TV is certainly extremely convenient. I did discover when trying to watch something from 4oD. They don't have an app, so I tried watching the video when casting the tab from Chrome. But that proved horrifically laggy, so in the end I had to just use the other HDMI cable in the TV to connect it to the PC. No major issue there. Casting a normal webpage is a little laggy but acceptable.

Generally I absolutely love the Chromecast and can't wait to buy more to plug into the rest of the TVs and monitors around the house.

PC Mod: Minecraft Creeper Case Build Log #4

Intro

Firstly, apologies its been a long time since I put up anything.
Since I am not a pro modder and don’t possess the skills that most avid modders have of being able to go from a conceptual drawing straight to a working on the final product in metal work, I figured that I would try mocking up my design and ideas first.
Having moved into my first home a couple of months I have an abundance of cardboard boxes, so I believe I can hack and coerce them to help me model my project.

Rallying the Soldiers

The first step was that I needed dimensions from the items that I knew I would be using in this build, so it was a case of digging into the chassis of my gaming rig so that I could measure up the size of the motherboard and a GTX 260. The PSU I would be using is currently in what is my HTPC so I decided to measure up one of the random, no-name ones that I had laying around.
So, armed with dimensions, a stanley knife, a measuring tape and a bit of wood I headed out to the garden to start slicing and dicing (hopefully not me!).

I got cracking by working out how best to maximise my usage of the cardboard. It worked out that the large square side is, give or take a centimeter the same size as the motherboard. So that was a quick decision.

Out of the material that you can see in the above picture, I managed to cut out shapes for the motherboard, the PSU and the graphics card.

So now that I had all the bits, it was time to start sticking them together. The motherboard was just left as is, the two pieces that were for the graphics card were taped together quickly. Now the PSU took a bit more effort. I had cut out 8 pieces for the PSU, I then used smaller pieces of card as a spacer to try and bulk up the stack to make it more like the actual PSU size.

So now I have the motherboard, graphics card and PSU modelled, the next task is a bit to represent the SSD/HDD, radiators and pump. Once they are made, then its on to making the actual chassis/framework that will be the case. Personally, it’s starting to come together slowly I think!
Take care, ciao for now!
cav3 d1v3r

PC Mod: Minecraft Creeper Case Build Log: #3

Introduction

This post is primarily a shopping list … there are still lots of blanks where I just haven’t thought of anything yet.

Parts

To summarise the PC specifications:

Component	Make and Model	Status
Motherboard	XFX 780i	Got
CPU	Intel - Q6600	Got
RAM	Corsair 8 GB	Got
GPU	XFX GTX 260	Got
Blu-Ray Drive	TBD	Not got
PSU	TBD	Not got
SSD	TBD	Not got
HDD	TBD	Not got
CPU Waterblock		Got
GPU Waterblock	TBD	To buy
Fixtures & Fittings	TBD	To buy
Tubing	Probably Tygon	To buy
Pump	Lanig D5	Got
Radiators	2 240mm radiators	Got 1

I'm not sure how I will mount the drives yet. Possibly some kind of permanent bracket on the back wall behind the creeper face that allows the drives to simply screw into that.

One thing I did see that was interesting with the Silverstone TF-03 Mini that I mentioned in my last post was that the motherboard is mounted diagonally across the case from front to back. That would be an interesting way of hiding components like a PSU, but then, with the mods I have in mind, I should be able to make PSU etc. look interesting so I then wouldn't want to be hiding it – we shall see!
Ciao for now!

PC Mod: Minecraft Creeper Case Build Log #2

Introduction

In my previous post, I talked about a concept idea I have for my first PC mod. This PC probably isn't going to be based on a brand-new PC, as I do have a lot of parts laying around that I could probably use to build this. My main gaming rig has an XFX 780i NVidia motherboard in it, as shown below:

My XFX 780i motherboard

And with the wicked green colour theme I think that would look great in the case. Although, the board is very black, ideally I’d want a good 50% to be green. But we shall see how things go. I’m still a way off fitting things.

3D Model

I've managed to convert my very primitive drawing into a 3D mock up, which I think looks half decent, although I will admit my Sketch-Up-Fu skills are sincerely lacking (I can't even remember how to make a curved pipe!!), but I think it gets the point and general idea across right?


 

So what we can see here is that the outer shell is going to be a tall oblong with a square horizontal profile. I did see a case made by Silverstone called the TF-03 Mini. It is very similar shape, the only problem is that it is design for Mini-ITX motherboards, all my motherboards are ATX (especially the 780i shown above). My big challenge internally is where to put the PSU. Initially my thoughts were to put it “up top” as shown in the picture behind the creeper face, but I’m thinking I might be able to keep it low and try and make it look like a stack of TNT somehow.

The water-cooling piping – that is going to try to be the guts of the creeper so I’m torn between green piping or clear with green coolant. Especially if I can get UV reactive  that would look good. I want to fully water cool the whole thing the CPU and the GPU. If it is possible to get water blocks for the motherboard that would look really good.

I’ve almost got myself convinced that I will have to make custom length cables, certainly if I want to try and keep them hidden.

Whilst reading my favourite PC site (www.custompc.co.uk) I came across a review for the Silverstone TF-03 Mini (http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cases/2012/09/28/silverstone-ft03-mini-review/1) and whilst reading it I came across a very inspiring image for the design of my case, I stole it from the review:

Silverstone TF-03 Mini case

Seeing this seems like a logical design for my case. My idea is to keep it simple and just use thumbscrews that are colour matched so that they blend in well and the great thing is that it will mean that each panel can come off independently of the others I think for neatness the front panel should be held in place by the side panels. So my idea is that the thumb screw of the side panels would first go through the side panel, then through a lip of the front panel before finally screwing into some framework.

I had wondered whether building up a framework would be needed, but it seems like the only logical design – how else do you really give good support to the motherboard for instance?

Right, thats all for now folks
Ciao for now!

Measuring Power

Introduction

This post is all about making sure your folding rigs are as perfect as possible. The key measure of perfection is of course the points that it produces, storming your way up the charts is important! However, one must also consider the cost of achieving those points. For those us that are at university, or live with family and friends where electricity is free or included in rent, then you don’t need to think twice about it. But for the vast majority of the population, we need to factor in how much power a rig consumes to achieve the points.

So the new measure is now Points-Per-Watt (of electricity). However, we don’t usually care about points, we care about our Points Per Day (PPD), so the measure is PPD/W.

What’s a Watt?

A Watt (W) is one Joule of electrical energy per second. You will notice that power supplies having a power rating, so a 400W PSU can supply 400 Joules of energy every second. Now one joule/watt is actually a really small amount of energy, so small we don’t care. Or rather, utility companies don’t care. Utility companies measure/bill you in units of KwH. I.e Kilo-Watt Hours. Bear with me, I know this sounds a bit odd, but it will make sense eventually. One KwH is the power consumed by a 1 kilowatt device in one hour. There are 1000 Watt’s in a kilo-watt. So a device that uses 2000 Watts in an hour consumes 2KwH. Also, a device pulling just 500W for only 30 minutes consumes 0.25KwH.
So if we have a PC that is consuming 400W (we will talk about how we measure that later), that means it is consuming 400 Watts per hour, or in Utility terms, 0.4 KwH. So if we left that PC running for one hour, we would end up with a bill that equates to 0.4KwH worth of electricity.

Measuring the Watts

In my previous paragraph, I spoke about how much power the PC consumes (or “pulls” from the wall). We can measure this by using a device called a power meter. Here is an example of one:

Power meter

It behaves a bit like those extension block cubes that you can get, you plug the meter into the wall and then you plug your device into it. There is nothing stopping you plugging an extension bank into it (which is likely, your PC will have a monitor, the tower, maybe speakers and a printer). So the power meter will tell you the total power consumption of whatever you plug into it. So knowing how much it pulls, and knowing the performance (point production) you can work out the simple ratio, points per day, divided by the power consumption is your PPD/W.

For these calculations, I strongly recommend that you only have the tower plugged into this device, have everything else plugged into a different socket. Why? The power draw of a PC does vary quite a bit so you want to know how much ONLY the tower is consuming since if you have a dedicated folding machine, you won’t have the monitor on, so why bother measuring it! If you are interesting you can watch the power consumption vary when you turn on the FAH client, after about 15 minutes of 100% components will be running hot, so fans spin up (increasing your power consumption)

Why are we working this out? Well take a few examples, one person is using their top-notch NVidia graphics card to fold on, and it is giving them 25,000 PPD, but, graphics cards are power hungry and it consumes 450 Watts. Another person has an average PC with an average graphics card and between the two devices it produces 12,000 PPD but pulls 300W. Another person has bought a very expensive workstation PC, it comes with two Xeon processors and a bit of RAM only and pulls 350W but produces 120,000 PPD. Which PC is best? Well its quite obvious that the last one (the workstation) is clearly a beast. But between the first two, which is it? The graphics card produces more, but consumes much more power (which will cost more to run, more about that in a minute). So what we do is work out the PPD/W ratio for each of them.

	PC 1	PC 2	PC 3
Points Per Day	25,000	12,000	120,000
Power Consumption (W)	450	250	350
PPD/W	55.6	48	342.9

So what can we see? So the first two PC’s are actually very similar in terms of the points per Watt, PC 1 is marginally better so you would choose to run that. However, if you had a very limited budget but still wanted to contribute then PC 2 is still pretty good and its low power consumption means it won’t cost that much to run. PC 3 is obviously a beast, it is doing a daft amount of PPD and is pulling a modest amount of power. For the record, PC 3 is typical of those who have 2P Xeon workstations or 4P AMD workstations.

How much is it going to cost me?

So we’ve worked out how much power a PC pulls, and we can compare various PC’s as well, but ultimately, how much will it cost me to run. Well there is a very simple formula:
Cost (£) = power consumption * time * cost per unit

Just to run through that, the power consumption we know from our meter. Time, how long will the PC be running? Ideally 24x7! Cost per unit, now this is where you need to look at your energy tariff. It varies alot across the country (UK) and even around the world. But it can even vary by time of day – if you have an economy 7 tariff, you get a discount for energy use at night (based on the fact that you can’t shut down a power station!) in the later case, it can be a bit tricky. For me personally, its about 12.1p/KwH. But lets work through some simpler examples.

Example 1

I have a PC that I want to run FAH on, but I will only be running it for on average 2-3 hours a day (it’s my gaming PC, so the folding software runs when I go to play games and generally use the PC), how much will it cost me over a month? I’ve used a power meter, and my PC pulls an average of 275W when under full load.
OK, there are three things we need to know to work out cost:

1. Power Consumption = 275W
2. Time = 3 hrs. (per day) * 31 days (per month)
3. Cost Per Unit = 12.1p

So, we substitute in our known values:
Cost = 0.275 * 3 * 31 * 0.121
Cost = £3.09
So the PC on its own will cost just over £3 per month to run

Example 2

I have a dedicated folding PC, it will run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days per year. It pulls 350W, how much will it cost over the course of the year?
OK, same technique:

1. Power Consumption = 350W
2. Time = 24 hrs. (per day) * 365 days (per year)
3. Cost Per Unit = 12.1p

Cost = 0.35 * 24 * 365 * 0.121
Cost = £370.99

So the PC will cost me nearly £371 a year to run, that's about £35 a month to your bill. Now you can see why you want to use the hardware that gives the highest points, but for the least power consumption. Even though this second PC only consumes a bit more power (per hour), the fact its on 24 hours a day means that the cost rack up quickly which if you are not prepared for it, can be quite a shock, especially if you pay by the quarter as opposed to monthly like I do.
I hope that has been useful for you!
Ciao for now!

PC Mod: Minecraft Creeper Case Build Log #1

Background and Inspiration

I'm a lucky guy to have an amazing girlfriend, but one of the many things that makes her amazing is that she is a GAMER! How often do you find women into games eh? It’s awesome! One of the many games that she loves to play (and got me into) is Minecraft. The inspiration for this build came from one of the enemies (mobs) in the game called a Creeper:

Minecraft Creeper

Apparently the creeper came from a design of a cow that went wrong! So I want to build a PC for my lovely girlfriend that will be designed to look like a creeper.

Whilst the inspiration for the PC came from Minecraft, the actual “need” for a PC came about with my girlfriend. She has always been a modest gamer, but she uses a Mac. So I've had my heart set on getting her a PC for quite a while. I regularly read the project logs and see some amazing stuff being made, and I read the guides on Bit-Tech and they seem to make it look so easy to make decent looking work. So I thought I'd give it a go. So this is a confession that this is my first ever scratch built PC and mod, so I'm not expecting an amazing result compared to some of the regular modders on here, but hey, it will be a learning experience right?

Sponsorship

There are currently no sponsors at this stage, however this space has been reserved should any come forward.

The Plan ^TM

For now I'm coming up with some initial designs and sketches of how I want the PC to look. An afternoon of sketching whilst watching Toy Story 3 with my little brother has resulted in the following conceptual drawing:

Conceptual Drawing

As you can (or can't) see in the picture above, the idea is that the main body will be fairly square in cross-section and be reasonably tall. In order to make the “legs” of the creeper that you can see in the first picture, my idea is to use water-cooling radiators, one of the front and one on the back. That will give it the “bulk”.

There will be a “window” on the front that will allow you to see inside, the water-cooling piping will be either green, or filled with green coolant to make it look like the guts of the creeper.
There will be two “drives”, one Solid-State “boot drive” and a high capacity storage drive to hold the steam and origin (she likes the Sims too!) libraries.

The eye's of the creeper will have the Power and HDD activity lights (one per eye) and they will be red LED's. I was thinking red because red looks evil and horrible, and after all the creepers are wicked little buggers. Or maybe they should be green? I'm not sure yet. I'm thinking that the widest part of the mouth should be the “optical drive”. Not the type where the tray comes out, I'm thinking the kind where you slot the disc in and the drive “eats the disc”. For a bit of future proofing, I think this should be a Blu-Ray, but at the very least it needs to be a DVD drive. I think that the bottom of the mouth (either side) should be the on/off and reset switches (black to blend in as much as possible).

From the picture below, we can see that the internal anatomy of a creeper contains a significant amount of TNT:

Creeper Anatomy

I'm not sure how I'm going to make something look like TNT.  I've got an OCZ 500W PSU. It's non-modular. But I'm tempted to try and convert it to a modular PSU using the modding guide on Bit-Tech to try and keep the wiring down to a minimum (I do also think I will need to make custom cables for this, primarily due to length to help with the cable routing).

I'm thinking that if I disassemble the PSU, and give the case a good sanding down to get down to bare metal then I could repaint it red and maybe spray paint on the TNT lettering.

Right, that’s me done with conceptions and creativity for now, I’ll try and publish more information as the project progresses (very slowly!)

Keeping organised: electronic components

Background

As you all know, I received an Arduino Starter Kit for Christmas, I gave a quick un-boxing guide here. 

The Electronic Components box in the kit contains, quite shockingly, all your electronic components, such as resistors, potentiometers, switches, LEDs. You do get quite a good selection, a very good selection if I'm completely honest! And they all come in this nice neat anti-static bag. 

Herein is the issue.

All these components with tiny and some not-so tiny legs all in one bag, and you are after one in particular ... What can possibly go wrong?

Well I'm an organisation / planning freak so I like everything neat and organised and to know where they are. If you are in a professional workshop and producing hundreds of boards, you probably have your bench with lots of these :

The one above is quite a small one, you can get these with over 100 drawers in. And they are the perfect width for having the tapes that resistors come on in without breaking them out. Ideal!

However for those of us whom are just starting in electronics these are both a) big and bulky b) more than you need c) can be very expensive!

So something else is needed ...

The Solution!

I was having a wander around B&Q in the post-Christmas sales, I was after some mirror mounting pieces, but whilst comparing the prices to both Homebase down the road and Amazon, I found (thinking back I really should have known this .... ah young, first-home-owner, lessons learned) that B&Q was a rip off!

So whilst walking to the door I just happened to spot piles of Really Useful Boxes. Now I've used these for nearly 10 years. I first encountered them when I was getting ready for university. My mum bought me a load (being a teenager I never noticed prices, especially when others were paying - it was her choice she suggested them!) and as such they were used to move me in, out and up and down the country for years. Having bought my first home in April 2013, it is only today I noticed that one of them (of about 15 I own!) has a crack in the corner - no where near bad enough to warrant it being binned, still massively useful, in fact its role hasn't even changed because of the crack!

So after all these years they have stood up to a lot of abuse and I can definitely vouch for them, yes they are expensive, but these will out last the contents! Anyway I digress

So I spotted the big ones and told the other half about them, she winced when she saw the prices! But then I spotted a palette of the tiny little ones that you use on your desk. There's no way I would buy them because really how useful would they be? To me, I doubt I'd use them, but then I saw a multipack like this :

All for £7. Thinking "pah, rip-off B&Q, let's see what my dear friend Google has to say" ... a few swishes on the smart phone later I was pleasantly shocked to see that Google says that B&Q was the cheapest! So I bought said pack!

Coming home I wanted to get on with organising all my components in my organisation freaky way.... I have to admit, I was slightly elated when I got home to do this, so on the sofa I went and poured out the components from the anti-static bag and started sorted into each tub. Each tub contained its own type of component. For instance one held switches, but also the potentiometers and the tilt switch. Another held all the LEDs, another had all the resistors (in an ideal world I'd like a box for each value of resistor!)

In the end, this is my newly organised array of boxed components :

So everything in its place, but where is it's place? Well to take things one step further I dug out the Sharpie marker pen and started labelling up the boxes fortunately, only one of the "fronts" of each box has the embossed Really Useful Box logo, so flipping them around I could start to label up each box with its contents as you can see below.

The very top row, which I've not marked up contains the jumper wires provided in the set, each box contains it's own size of wire from smallest to largest.

I hope that has been interesting. Let me know what you think and how you keep your bits, (electronics! wait that doesn't necessarily remove the innuendo ... ) organised.

Ciao for now!