Just had to show what I made yesterday (had to do something to cheer myself up after the Skins
vs. Giants debacle).
The black box is the enclosure I put together. It holds an
Apple Airport Express and the power supply for the white powered speakers sitting on top.
The speakers are the Altec Lansing inMotion 3 iPod speaker system. But
instead of playing music off my iPod, I'm using the Airport Express to stream
music from one of our computers to the speakers.
The Palm (the black thing) is the new
Palm T|X which is running the Salling Clicker remote control software.
Because the TX has Wi-FI, it can connect to my home network and (using the
software) control iTunes running on one of our computers. The display is
updated in real time with the song information and album art.
The green light is the Airport Express' status light. The red light is the
power switch.
The power line for the speakers and a line out cable from the Airport Express sticks out the back to connect to the speakers.
It is all powered via a retractable AC power cable intended for use with laptops.
Unfortunately, the original plan was to have the retractable cord slide into the enclosure when retracted. But I had to rearrange the internals after realizing that the Airport Express doesn't get power from its plug when the plug is folded down.
This is what the retracting cord part originally was intended to do:
And the inside of the Black Box before I had to jerryrig a new arrangement to allow the Airport plug to extend.
Since the cord reel doesn't "stow" anymore, I'll probably add some velcro to secure the reel to the back. And I'll also add some veclro to secure the speakers to the top.
Anyway, all in all I'm happy since I have one nicely portable source of music that I can control from anywhere in the house. And it was a lot cheaper than the Sonos system I was considering.
Now to figure out how to incorporate a dock or power connection for the Palm TX...
