Recent content by Sokoloff

You can buy the crimps from an electrical supplier (Newark, Mouser, Digikey, etc), cut the cable, crimp new ends on it and re-insert them into the housing. The actual work on the bench would be under 15 minutes.    Finding and ordering exactly the right crimp terminals will take you longer...

Pretty sure mine was from IVB's posts on AVSforum. It's possible that it was via an intermediate stop on CQC forums, but I think it's a little more likely that I came from AVS to here and then found about CQC.

There's also the "Express" program, with free development tools: http://www.microsoft.com/Express/ I use the real thing at work, but the Express editions at home. Honestly, Express covers everything that a hobbyist type would need. To the point that I can't even remember what the limits of the...

Same story for "Today's Active Topics"

Amps is what matters when sizing conductors, not watts. Your PoE phones are likely using 48V, meaning they only need .25A to get 12 watts. Spec for 24 guage wiring (conservative) is just over .5 A max, so you'd need to double up the pairs. If I were you, I'd dedicate an entire cat5 to the WSV...

Easiest is to test whether stopping CQC does in fact give up the serial port and let Upstart work. (I suspect it will.)

Have a look at the Elk M1G. With a couple of input expander boards, you have your doors covered; it has an ethernet board available, and can do light automation onboard.

Because the smokes are a life safety item, I'd be more inclined to pull a new run of firewire there. The occupancy sensor I wouldn't worry about splices at all. Honestly, the splices are going to be fine in 99.9999% of the cases, but even that 1 in a million is what makes me extra cautious and...

Ah gotcha, my music port is sitting in the box waiting for me to get around to building the (or repurposing a) host computer. If the sound is the only issue, you can open up mstsc, go to the options and tell it to "leave sounds at remote computer", save the connection settings as an rdp file...

If the only problem is that your server is headless, and you think that creating new playlists would be relatively rare, use RDP to drive the server machine from a machine that does have a monitor. From any machine on your network, start:run: mstsc /v SERVERNAME /admin login and drive the...

On the tarp durability issue, here's two thumbs way up on this style of tarp clip: http://www.gemplers.com/product.aspx?itemN...clip|2662678825 As for the other issues, I hear ya, but here's another thing to think about if you're dealing with green wood (even if it's been felled a year now)...

If it were me, and I wanted an actual structure, I'd give a lot of thought to building an outbuilding in a style similar (or at least complementary) to the main house. In my case unfortunately, that would be brick with a slate roof. Good thing I probably couldn't get a permit to do it anyway...

I think what Wayne was getting at is that if you only measure current, and average it over time, assume a power-factor of exactly 1 and a voltage of exactly some standard value, you can achieve that measurement at a much lower cost/processing power requirement. It also is wrong for loads with a...

If you don't need to monitor all the circuits all of the time, but are satisfied with total power drawn, and then live monitoring of 3 sub-loads at once, Brultech's new 1240 does what you want for 60Hz loads right now. And I seem to recall that you could link multiple 1240s together if you...

I don't know the particulars of the Brultech unit, as the ancient RS-232 standard says 50', but in practice with good cable most modern units can do 4-10x that with no problem. If you need longer or more noise-immunity, there are line drivers (basically amplifiers/repeaters/signal shapers) that...