Planet Geek

Rockin in the Workshop

Geekitude

So there's this house we're calling Interlude. It's a rental, we're living in it since we sold Homeport and is our home until Mosaic is ready for us, sometime late next year.

It has a usable basement, with a high ceiling and dry floors. Not particularly warm in the winter, but usable.

I've moved my workbench, my tool chest, all my tools and parts and other debris into a nice little work area, and have been slowly working on various projects (such as the Mame cabinet - see that post for a picture of my workshop space).

But something was missing.

This past weekend, I finally gathered together all the pieces of the Roku Soundbridge M500 I won from Radio Paradise two and a half years ago. Not long after I got the Roku, it broke in a funky way - part of the LCD display went blank. I contacted Roku about getting it repaired, they said to send it in and they'd look at it, but I never got around to doing so. Ah well.

This past weekend I powered it up again, just to see if I could get it useable in the workshop. Oddly, it came up fine, even connected to our wireless network. With 3" of the left side of the LCD out of action, I had a hard time navigating the menus until I found the 'brightness' function, cranked all the way up, gave a sort of 'shadow' on the LCD where the text was. A few updates later, and I was up and running with RadioParadise, listening through the old stereo I had installed a while back.

Ahhhhhh.

I really wish these devices (that stream audio either via wireless or network) were less expensive or easy to put together by hand. I could totally see having a bunch of these for Mosaic for public spaces around the community. "I'll be out in the workshop, I'll run up RP there."

Posted by dbs at December 29, 2007 2:17 PM