Ultimate Homelab Cable Setup

in this video we're going to get my home lab cable setup into its final form to get there we're going to need to fix a couple of industrial RF modulators from 1996 and 1999 that have been giving me trouble we'll clean up some open source software I wrote to handle the media streaming and then we'll get everything installed you might be wondering what is homelab cable well my definition is streaming any media of your choice in such a way that you can tune to it on a television for a long time I've been using this channel plus RF modulator it can take composite in your media source turn it into coax out on a Channel of your choice to tune to with your television there's nothing wrong with this from a technical perspective but I never really found a permanent spot for it in the rack whenever it got in the way I would just throw it to the side and unhook everything and it would end up in a pile on the floor that's why I want to switch to these rack mounted RF units everything will have a permanent place in the rack where it belongs I've got several of these and they all have problems so we're going to need to fix a couple of them along the way then we'll deal with the software side of things I'll show you how to get this set up yourself and some custom utilities that I've written and finally we'll get it all installed let's get into it these are a pair of blunder tongue RF modulators so they can take a composite signal in you know the yellow white red that you're probably familiar with and they can turn it into something your TV can turn to over coax in our example here Channel 9 or Channel 13 these have each been hardwired to a channel our use case of course is to take the output from a Raspberry Pi the composite output that these older 3B pluses can do and we'll convert that over to a channel for some home lab cable these two units are exhibiting similar but equally concerning behavior let's get this top one hooked up and I'll show you what it's doing these are pretty much identical by the way except of course the channels that they're hard-coated to which is desirable in my case this first one has a very short cable as you can see the other one has a longer you know 3ft normal length cabl so that's kind of weird and the cables are different and this one has aged differently the black coating is wearing off down to metal super weird on the back you have the RF coax out that you would go put into your TV and they have coax component in but that's no big deal you can buy these really cheap RCA 2 coax adapters and deal with that problem so don't be worried about that if you're picking one of these up they're also mono but that's also no big deal you can get little Splitters that combine your right and left if you really want to to help us out on our testing Adventure today my wife's childhood N64 complete with Wave Race pretty simple to get us started here so on the back obviously I've got video and audio coming from the N64 and the coax cable going out to the TV got the TV tuned to channel 13 this this is plugged directly into the VHF UHF input on the back and right when we turn it on we can see the screen goes black the N64 is off so no surprise there and the first hint at maybe something funny is going on is you can hear a very slight hum coming from this and if we turn this on a very loud hum along with of course the sound and it's really pronounced when the N64 is just showing the logo look at the mic closer so yeah that really sounds like power related in a previous video I had shown some of this and got a bunch of really good comments the verdict pretty much being something wrong with power I did try one of these ground Loop isolators in line on the coax cable and it had no effect whatsoever so let's tear into this thing we've just got some philp screws on the back here and then the nuts on the coax connections are actually also retaining the case so you take those off just with some pliers these guys then this metal shield lifts up but the coax connections have these little spacers washer things so each one has one and those will go flying if you're not careful I just had a quick look around nothing obviously suspicious look at this though what happened this light works I think look at that some sort of overheating it's on the legs too very weird got it plugged in I'm just trying to figure out where the humming is coming from it's this Transformer it's probably not picking it up on the mic so this is going to sound ridiculous but you can like take a tool touch the item you're suspicious of and put your ear to the other end and it'll be very obvious if the tool is touching the thing that's vibrating like a cap or something uh yeah good advice right put your head and attach it to an open power supply circuit anyway it goes without saying this is Main's voltage so be careful let's put the video in turn the N64 on I can hear the hum coming over the TV with just the video connected I wonder what it does only audio that's weird you don't get anything at [Music] all well I do not have the skills required nor the equipment to analyze this RF output or the analog going in or really anything going on here uh let's see what kind of voltage we're getting out looks like that little power section is giving us 12 volts DC to this left circuitry side coming through a post right here and yeah very nice you can just see it on the board it's even labeled 12 volts so it's taking 16 Vols AC in from this Transformer that is buzzing making noise and turning it into 12 volts over here I think what I'd like to do is desolder the 12vt line coming in to the circuitry that's what this is from the segregated power section over here and we'll hook up a 12vt input this way with a little Barrel Jack separator like that and we'll just see we'll see if this section over here is introducing some sort of noise into the line turn the iron on does this seem like a weird way to do this like you've got this metal wall they have some sort of isolator here so that the 12vt isn't touching this which is grounded of course and then this wire runs all the way down the chassis why not just run this wire a little longer through the hole with a rubber grommet i' like is there some sort of isolation behavior I'm missing here got that wire off pretty uneventful my camera died while I was doing that sorry I'm going to make sure I understand that I'm actually getting 12 volts out of here glad I checked that one 16 volts coming out of this 12vt adapter grabbed another one see if this behaves any better yeah 12 much better all right we're just going to patch this in here real quick tin my iron up all right good enough now we need a ground point I think I'm just going to stick it under this screw here just to confirm that is a grounded screw might not be the best ground though so we'll see what happens this is not what you want we'll just keep that safely isolated okay I'm just going to plug it in see see what happens nothing should happen good let's hook it up to the TV okay we are hooked back up pointed at the TV channel 13 plug it in man it was really slow to come on that's interesting is it still pulling the voltage we expect it Is Well it's worse [Music] yeah it's less annoying when music is actually playing and it's not bad enough to hear it over the music like I could [Music] before H we'll call this partially fixed well I thought about it a little more changing the power supply made things better so switching from the tired old internal one to to a wall wart did make things better so I thought let's try a better wall adapter check this out plug it in no buzzing fixed yes this thing all it needed was a better power supply there is occasional Buzz sometimes there's none at all sometimes that's just a little bit vast Improvement and this is not even a nice AC adapter so what I'm going to do is hunt down either an internal one to put in here or find the nicest AC adapter I can the quality of power for these RF modulators is really important as you've seen we get all that buzzing from a power supply that works and is giving the right voltage but it's dirty power it makes a mess of everything I'm happy with this let's rip these guts out and make this a little more permanent I'm just going to rip all this out entirely I could get another Transformer 120 volt 110 in to a Transformer changing it into 16vt AC is actually really common for doorbells at least here in North America yeah I don't know I'm sure all the ones I could find online would be even worse than this old one that's wearing out so I'm just going to take everything out couple of screws for that Transformer on the back here which are unfortunately connected by nuts so you got to do one of these maneuvers mhm didn't mean to break that oh well couple of screws here and here and we'll have to do something about this led this voltage regulator is using the case as a heat sink got to undo that just like that got everything out what was going on here where that led was really weird corrosion kind of looks like rust or like something burnt interesting the legs on the LED have a little black stuff on them too I'd like to reuse this so I'm going to pull it out and it's in line of course with this resistor over here LEDs need a resistor in line otherwise they'll burn out so I'll just copy whatever that value is it is ironically very helpful to add solder when you are desoldering something especially something this old this is probably from the early 2000s maybe earlier so yeah add the fresh stuff you don't have to be fancy with it and this should make it a lot easier to get that out got it now I need what appears to be a 222 Ohm resistor red red red it's nice and easy 220 will be close enough place your bets oh yeah I'm just doing this cuz I literally couldn't remember if it worked all right we can reuse it well that was shortlived I was getting everything wired up and one of the legs fell off the LED so rest in peace little guy let's give it a shot before I close it back up that's a lot brighter now no no buzz here's what I came up with thre an extra sleeve of heat shrink tubing here obviously heat shrink anywhere I had soldered and we got a nice ground Point here the resistor is in this sleeve right here on the positive side it gets ridiculously hot that little pack of resistors I got is I got that on Amazon years ago in my experience they're like total crap so I either use the wrong value or most likely those just suck I really need to buy a multi pack of resistors that are nice anyway I can solve that later not going to worry about that for now while we're testing here is the aftermath of fixing just this one happy with that repair though that's really nice to have that one fixed the first one I bought and it's the nicest looking one kind of attached to it I'm going to clean all this up and we'll move our attention over to channel 9 down here I'm also realizing why the one we just fixed on the top here had this much shorter cord the one on the bottom has a really long one you can daisy chain them so this would have been coming out here like this and you can actually just plug it into the next one to get power sort of like stereo equipment so yeah maybe blunder tongue sold them with these shorter pigtails or someone went in there and did that themselves because the cords are of a different style anyway that's probably why that's shorter should I install a daisy chain Barrel plug this one has a slightly different problem the video and audio coming out of it are perfect no problem whatsoever but listen to it when I turn it [Music] on yeah I'm guessing Transformer issue again let's get in there we're in open just like the other one and look at that the same exact corrosion on the LED or whatever this is burn marks rust that the other one had that's weird I wonder if that's a known issue so yeah let's turn it on yeah just pushing on it changes the vibration pattern it's not the mounts uh I checked these screws it's tight in there something's wrong internally causing it to vibrate so because that other repair went so well I'm just going to do the same thing I'm going to rip all this out and we'll put a barrel Jack [Music] in yeah I don't think I'll bother with the that resistor not too bad that's how we ended up I skipped the LED in this one as well until I buy some better resistors I don't trust them let's test it all right let's plug it in and of course the Transformer's gone so it makes no noise whatsoever let's get on Channel 9 power it on perfect it's even better than the other one silent no noise whatsoever excellent let's get this put back together it's the next day and I had trouble falling asleep last night because I couldn't stop thinking about that overheating resistor on this LED and then it finally dawned on me I read the resistor value on the original board wrong it was red red red 222 I forgot that the third stripe is actually two digits it's not 222 ohms it's 2200 ohms so of course this thing is getting way too hot in here and it's funny the whole time I was putting it in I was thinking man how did blunder tongue get away with such a small Ohm resistor you know I was expecting you know 1,000 ohms or something and of course they didn't get away with it because the laws of electricity wouldn't have let them for good measure I've got a 3300 Ohm resistor in here if you know enough about your LED you can actually calculate the resistor you need based on the voltage and forward current of the LED I don't know anything about my LEDs because they're from the eligo upgraded Electronics fun kit no data sheets with this one but that's all right we'll throw 3,300 in there just to be safe and we'll run a test plug this guy in here now within seconds obviously the 220 Ohm resistor I couldn't touch this at all was way hot to the touch within seconds that's what's going on inside this one right now so I'm going to leave this going for like 30 minutes or something and see how it goes all right all right about 30 minutes later and of course yeah still cold so I think that's going to work just fine I'm going to redo this one and I'll install an LED in this one that took forever but the result was worth it got working LEDs I'm getting pretty good at installing barjack mods and new LEDs in blunder tongue modulators let's get one of these guys wired up to a Raspberry Pi and we'll start looking at the software situation pretty straightforward got the Raspberry Pi plugged in here it's on the network using one of these nice Poe injectors to actually power it off the network cable it's always fun it's spitting out composite video over this cable got the video coming in along with the audio and this is what I was talking about earlier these RF modulators usually just take mono and you can just get one of these Splitters to combine left and right and bring it into one then of course we're going out to the TV we have the Raspberry Pi broadcasting its screen on Channel 9 as you can see right there in the terminal here we are sshed into the Raspberry Pi it's called TV and and I have a bunch of TV shows mounted here from my Nas that we can start playing around with and try to get them to show up the simplest thing you can do in my opinion if you want to get this going yourself is use VLC the open source media player it's very capable runs great on the Raspberry Pi we can just say VLC and I'm pointing it at a single episode of The Simpsons and hit go sure enough The Simpsons are now playing on Channel 9 in my house but that's a little limited because you'd have to come in here and do it every time or write a fancy script to do it I think there's a simple way to just get VLC to randomize you can invoke VLC in such a way that it'll just randomly play what's ever in a folder so you give it Das Das playlist Auto start-- Loop D- playlist tree and then the folder this is just going to randomly plow through Simpsons episodes there it goes and there's some other ways you can set up playlists and stuff but it wasn't really going to be as flexible as I had dreams 4 basically in my own hom lab so of course I wrote my own home lab Cable Management tool called go home laab cable because it's written in go so ghlc it's got a command line utility you can start up a server you can also use a client to interact with a server so what's that look like ghlc server pretty similar to VLC it's using VLC under the hood we're just able to control a lot more things which I'll show you you give it a path just like before I've got a bunch of stuff in media let's just point it at The Simpsons again okay a server has started up The Simpsons are playing so what well if we go to another tab here and we fire up the client ghlc client you can see right away it spits back the episode that's playing and what's up next so that's kind of interesting and maybe even more interesting if we hit a browser if we hit the Raspberry Pi at Port 30004 we have a UI that is attempting to tell us things so it's got some status stuff it's got the playing and what's up next it's got this cute little rack mount looking thing and you can also notice that it's a total disaster it's not responsive I am not a designer I stole a bunch of these little CSS examples off the internet and it just it's not working this is one of the scope creep items that has slowed me down from making this thing more usable and sharing it with you all so this is one of the problems but back to the Raspberry Pi that's running goom laab cable it also exposes a rest API so it has this notion of networks so we can ask the server instance hey give me all your networks by default it only has one you can only have one this is more scope creep I introduced on myself they have call signs which is kind of cute I guess and networks can have channels so we can ask KH hlc K hom laab cable what its channels are and you can see we have the one channel you're watching right here and what's playing what's up next you can give it Commands to control the channel so I have this channel playing The Simpsons right here and I can tell it play next and there it goes now it's Advanced to the next one playing this one now and it's queued up another one for what's next so I can just issue that again if I want and there we go so this was the sort of flexibility I was looking for except I did all sorts of scope creep on myself so that nice friendly client it only tells you what's next you can't actually tell it to play the next one so the whole thing is kind of frustrating I've let it kind of scope creep on me to the point where I don't even work on it so for the purposes of this episode I'm going to pair it way down I'm going to make all the multi- channel stuff super optional and I want to make it really easy for someone other than me to just come in here and fire up go home lab cable get this stuff running and be able to control it through a web browser or through this command line client speaking of this this was a cute idea and everything but it's a disaster so I'm going to throw this up in a branch for future reference and I'm going to scrap this whole thing and make a super simple UI that just tells you what's going on and lets you click next without further Ado we'll do a badass coding Montage which is probably going to take me several days and I'll be back allow me to introduce you to the development setup this is a VM I'm sshed into called Big auntu which I made like years ago he's literally just a VM with 32 cores and 32 gigs of ram in my proxmox instance and I use it for development basically so we've got go home lab cable sitting here and Bs code has a really nice extension called the remote SSH extension and I can connect open up a folder of my choice and Bam so all this lives on that VM I'm sshed in basically and then as I'm developing and testing I run the server back over here in proxmox I take a look at the VM I usually have this on another monitor and you can see it's playing The Simpsons slowly and terribly this thing doesn't have any video Hardware but it's enough for me to see if it's doing the right thing and advancing to the next episode and so on let's get [Music] busy progress now you can run the CLI utility and say a client live and it'll spit back some text about what's playing what's up next you can always optionally give it a Json flag and it'll spit back Json if you wanted to call this thing programmatically for some reason but we can say client live it says playing is season 6 number one up next is season 7 number six and now we can just simply say client play next and it'll spit back what it's up to you can see in the background it's switching episodes and now 76 is is playing as we'd expect up next is 410 you can do that all day if you want and of course ask for the information that's much easier to use and you don't have to worry about channels or any of that complicated stuff I had only in my head now let's move on to the UI uh we're almost there I want the text to bounce back and forth not the whole LCD hilarious [Music] [Music] I think we're in business let's start up a new server it's kicking off an episode of The Simpsons in the background there go over to our client and it tells us what it's playing and what's next we can say play next with the client and we're playing 04 episode 16 now go to the web browser and it's showing us the right episode which is great click this next button and we can see it's cycling in the background shows the new one this is as far as I'm going to take it tonight it's still terrible basically needs to be completely Rewritten from a UI perspective but it's usable by the time you're watching this video at least this will be available on GitHub with that out of the way let's get back to the fun stuff I've got this Extron computer to video scan converter it takes VGA in turns it into composite out for these RF modulators I've got big servers in the rack they've got VGA out they're not working very hard so I figure why not take advantage of that in the most convoluted way possible and then of of course I've been dying to Rack this thing up we need active monitoring at the rack folks this is a serious cable operation we've got going on down here let me show you what this Extron is all about this is an Extron rackmountable computer to video scan converter it can take VGA in and turn it into composite s video RGB out really cool in a video quite a while ago I picked this unit up and the power supply was broken and I went about fixing it I actually put a Pico PSU in here and it now takes a barrel Jack I have this 3D printed plug pretty sweet reminded myself that it's 12volt Center positive in fact I need to go do that on the blunder tongues are you sensing a barrel Jack Trend here with my modifications we're going to rack that thing up and take the VGA out from this Dell r720 and use that for one of our [Music] channels this is going to be so good I have a power distribution issue because I'm changing everything over to 12vt wall warts I'll solve that later on the back of this thing VGA going to the r720 this is going into to the blunder tongue and coming out on Channel 9 is my proxmox login it's never easy here's the r720 when I try to run the server it complains about audio issues if we run speaker test yeah it's complaining about audio that machine has a video card in there that I don't think works it's trying to redirect audio there it doesn't have an audio card otherwise let's pull that video card put an audio card in see what happens I was going to lament about this machine having been up for 2 years or something but it's only been up for 22 days wonder when that happened good night I haven't been in here in a very long time if you're getting one of these spend the money on the rails you will not regret it so let's see here comes off believe this is our video card which I've never been able to get to work so let's get that out of there an old Nvidia Quattro I do need to figure out a video card situation for this for this very reason actually we'll try throwing this really crappy sign blaster in here it's a half height card got to take that off this thing came with both brackets believe it or not full and half length so we'll get that short one off there put this on just like that all bet you didn't think you were going to see a crappy Sound Blaster being installed into a Dell r720 Enterprise server today when you woke up I aim to please here's the most satisfying part of these rails and you slide it in it helps if you put the lid back on these Dell Lids sit on there and then you use the latch to close them into place I really like that design now it's really funny to watch that server boot on Channel 9 that old Enterprise iron takes quite a while to start back up but she's back online let's see if we can run the go home lab cable server it's running but it's not outputting on the right display I think we can figure that out well that was a lot more convoluted than I thought it was going to be of course we couldn't start it up because we didn't have graphical environment the X server wasn't running you can see we have one now and The Simpsons running on my r720 proxmox server going through a VGA to composite converter hitting a blunder tongue RF modulator and I'm watching it on Channel 9 Piece of Cake let's complete the setup folks this is ridiculously good I am so happy with how this turned out I can't believe I was living without this all this time oh and check this out I can play N64 in here now new gaming setup don't worry about what's going on behind the scenes we won't worry about that I'll clean that up never I'm super pumped on that setup I love the three screens on there seeing what's live on each Channel and you can play N64 so awesome actually have another one of these blunder tongue units might have noticed in the intro video and it's like a really impressive way cooler looking one it doesn't work at all no output nothing I don't think it's a power issue something else going on so someday I'll fix this one but I think two channels is good enough for now and I really like that everything is inside the rack that whole setup uses about 40 Watts even with all three screens on so that's okay I really need to look into solar the goom lab cable software is okay I'm not making any promises on that but it's usable I've pressure tested it pretty good it's been running channels for days at a time doesn't crash and you can go use it and edit it to your heart's content at the GitHub link down below but that'll do it for this one I think my home lab cable setup is in a good position for a long time to keep me happy and I can always just rotate through what each channel is playing thank you so much for watching I hope you enjoyed this please subscribe if you haven't already I've got a lot more videos coming down pipe in 2024 and if you'd like to support the channel further and fuel my eBay addiction you can check me out on patreon I post behind the scenes type updates I actually posted a full Workshop 30 minute tour and I try to occasionally post videos early before they go up on this main Channel thanks again for watching and I hope you tune in to the next one

Channel: clabretro

Views: 176,786

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Id: W7m7OW2xrJE

Length: 32min 45sec (1965 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 07 2024